In Ketchikan, Alaska, there are waters on which a 14-year-old boy can spend his summer commercial fishing on an old wooden skiff for five days at a stretch, just him, the captain, and their catch swimming in the dark depths beneath them. There are forests that support a construction industry that will pay a 17-year-old boy nearly $30 an hour to do backbreaking labor for 10 hours without taking lunch. And there are tiny islands without roads on which a boy can grow up in a 900-square foot log cabin set well above the water on pilings, traveling to and from school on a 13-foot boat.
Some of those boys stay in Alaska, and make a good life there. Others are drawn to the lower 48, where a different kind of life awaits them. The one described above forged a path marked by unexpected turns to Chattanooga, where he’s now an attorney.
Patrick Cruise of the Hamilton Firm remembers the thing that lured him away from home: baseball. He’d played sports growing up, and upon graduating from high school, went to Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho to play ball. “Baseball motivated me to go to school. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a great ball player,” he says.
Cruise had, however, discovered he liked school, so he transferred to Pacific University near Portland, Ore., where he nurtured an interest in politics by working on local, state, and national campaigns. He had no interest in the law yet, but rather was considering teaching political science. A stint working in the state senate, where most of the politicians were lawyers, steered his thoughts in a new direction, though he still wasn’t seriously considering a career in law. More accurately, he took the LSAT on a whim because some of these friends were taking it, and it was time to make a decision about what to do next.
For law school, Cruise decided to go big and attend LSU. “I don’t think I would have been able to do that when I was 18. But it was different from anything I’d ever experienced. I was amazed. I liked the diversity of it,” he says.
In an attempt to solidify a future, many students get caught up in currents that carry them toward a profession they might not enjoy. And Cruise went from political science major to law student without having charted the course beforehand. Nonetheless, following graduation, he jumped in feet first and went to work for a personal injury law firm in Baton Rouge, La. He also met the woman who would become his wife.
After marrying, the two traveled to Tennessee occasionally. She liked the Chattanooga area and wanted to move to it. Although Cruise had a good job and enjoyed where they were living, he was open to relocating. In his words, “We rolled the dice and moved.”
Moving his belongings initially proved easier than transporting his work. When a friend offered him a position at a general practice firm in Dunlap, Tenn., he quickly found out he wasn’t suited for taking whatever work walked through the door. “I would not have been happy about the representation I would have been able to provide them. I wanted to focus on a few areas of the law and become proficient at them,” he says.
Around that time, lawyer Hu Hamilton placed a help wanted ad for a personal injury lawyer. The two met and Cruise got the job.
That was 2005. Today, Cruise’s office still looks like it could be his first day on the job. His desk, located at the far end of a sparsely furnished room on the upper floor of a two-story brick building on Broad Street, is surprisingly clutter free, although he does admit to having unloaded some papers on his paralegals. On the wall to his left hang his degrees and other credentials, neatly arranged and impressive in number for a relatively young attorney. At the far end of the room, lined up almost directly with Cruise’s head-on gaze from his chair, is a set of built-in shelves containing mostly family photos, also neatly arranged. On the wall to his right is a single drawing of a rainbow trout.
With the exception of his framed credentials, Cruise’s office doesn’t look like a space in which a lawyer is working. But to his clients, there’s no doubting that the man who spends untold hours there each week is indeed an attorney worthy of the title.
Cruise concentrates his practice on two areas: disability and serious injury. Of the former, he says, “Those are the clients that bring you cookies. They’re barely making ends meet, or they’re about to lose their house, and even a small amount of money makes a big difference. Those cases are mentally gratifying,” he says.
While Cruise likes developing his disability practice, the bread and butter of the Hamilton Firm are tractor-trailer wrecks, premises liability matters, and the like. The complex and knotty nature of these cases require an inordinate amount of time to resolve, which can weigh heavy on an attorney, but also afford Cruise the opportunity to take on work that often pushes him into virgin territory.
“We often handle difficult, catastrophic cases – the kind that require a lot of time and resources,” he says.
In recent years, Cruise has handled multiple texting-and-driving cases, one of which involved two deaths, represented a client in a “horrible” closed head injury case that resulted in a seven-figure jury verdict, and helped to try a fire loss case that resulted in a verdict of over $784,000. He also took on a white water rafting case, which prompted him to go rafting.
“These cases challenge you intellectually because you have to learn new things. So I went white water rafting. I wanted to know how to control the craft. I wanted to know what the safety procedures were,” he says.
While Cruise regularly faces some of Chattanooga’s finest attorneys, his staunchest adversary is monotony. He says the word a lot, and each time, he sounds like he’s tasted something disagreeable, making it clear without an open confession that he finds certain aspects of being a lawyer tedious and repetitive. His salvation, then, are the clients who bring something new and challenging through his door.
“These cases have allowed me to grow into the practice of law. I can’t say this is what I wanted to do when I was starting out, but over the last few years, I’ve come to think of this work as a craft – one I enjoy doing,” he says, his expression earnest.
From his desk, Cruise can view the building blocks of his life, arranged into isolated segments of work, family, and down time. Although Cruise does have a passion for practicing law, he wishes he could spend more time at the opposite end of the room, where his sons – one four, the other two – have taken up residence.
He does well for a busy attorney, though. Last night, he arrived home in time to tuck his boys into bed. This morning, he took them to school. “I try to balance it out. There are nights when I get home late and days when I cut out early,” he says.
Living at the trailhead of Rainbow Falls on Signal Mountain allows Cruise to literally walk down his driveway and begin hiking, something he enjoys doing with his boys. Sometimes, though, he enters the woods alone to hike or fish. He needs the time to recharge his batteries.
“Everyone should have something that takes them away from what they do every day. Fishing is mine. It’s an excuse to get in the woods. When you’re at work, you’re focused on work; when you’re with your kids, you’re focused on them; but when you’re in the woods, you’re just trying to fool a fish,” he says.
Talking about fishing takes Cruise back to Alaska, where his parents taught him the values that fashioned him into the man he’s become.
“My parents taught me that you’re never going to be the most talented or the smartest, but that effort is the great equalizer. Whatever I did, there was an expectation that I would have to work hard to do well,” he says.
Cruise laughs and says he feels like an old man telling a story about walking to school uphill in three feet of snow.
The winding path Cruise has travelled has the appearance of having been cut by someone who didn’t know exactly where he was going. Yet he’s able to take stock of his life and call it “blessed.” This makes Cruise a testimony to the importance of trusting in the lessons of one’s youth. After all, who’s to say a more carefully plotted path would have taken him to a better place?