Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 10, 2009
Rosemarie Bryan reflects on upbringing, path to litigation
Samara Litvack
“My background’s a little bit different,” says Rosemarie Bryan, from her office in the Tallan Building. She’s been a litigator with Chambliss, Stophel and Bahner since November 2006, but her story starts long before that.
Born in 1951 to German parents, Bryan’s father was captured by Canadians in France and brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. When her parents divorced, her mother married an American soldier and the family moved to the American sector.
“There were lots of Americans there and lots of military people,” she says. “It was not unusual for American military people to marry German spouses. That wasn’t unusual, but I really don’t remember a lot about it.”
Perhaps that’s because when she was 6, Bryan’s family moved from Germany to the United States. Her stepfather was originally stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, and eventually settled in Fort Story, in Virginia Beach, Va. But when her mother became ill, Bryan was sent to live in a foster home.
“My foster home was in Virginia Beach,” she says. But this was no ordinary foster home. “They were Mennonites and they were turkey farmers. And they lived out a two-mile dirt lane, and I was like, ‘Whoa. This is culture shock.’”
While her new family wasn’t as strict as many Mennonites, they were very fundamentalist as far as their religion. They had electricity but no television or radios. Bryan woke at 4:30 or 5 in the morning to fulfill her farm duties before she went off to school; her life, she says, was basically built around the things that needed to be done at a farm.
“This was not an orphanage,” she says. “This was a private home.”
Bryan stayed there until she turned 18 and moved away to college.
“I have a huge respect for the Mennonites,” she says. “I still go to that Mennonite church when I go home. I never became a Mennonite and I didn’t want to. It’s a very good religion. They don’t proselytize. They don’t try to get you to be a Mennonite or anything. They just really live their religion.”
After leaving for school, Bryan worked full-time to make ends meet. She worked as a secretary by day and attended school by night for nearly 10 years, until she finally received her undergrad in English from George Mason University.
“I knew English was a good degree because you can write, hopefully you can reason, that kind of thing,” she says.
Bryan spent the last few years of her undergrad working at a firm in Washington, DC called Pierson, Ball and Dowd. She commuted 50 minutes to two hours a day, each way, until finally her mentor there, Gordon Hatheway, asked her why she wasn’t in law school. She hadn’t even considered a career in law before working there. She appreciated her role as secretary, and to this day understands the value of that position.
“I think working there is when I started just watching what they did and what they do, what kinds of educations they had,” she says. “Of course, there were some brilliant lawyers there and there were some fairly mediocre lawyers there. So I started thinking there isn’t any reason I can’t do this, assuming I could make it through school. And by ‘make it,’ I mean just monetarily.”
So, at age 31, she began law school at the University of Virginia. After she completed her degree, she interviewed with Witt, Gaither and Whitaker in Chattanooga and moved to the Scenic City soon after.
“When I came there, I was the 13th lawyer,” Bryan says. She practiced at the firm for 24 years, until an unsuccessful merger took place in 2001.
“When our firm dissolved in 2006, we had like 40 or 50 lawyers. So it was quite a difference over the years, but I loved that firm.”
Bryan moved quickly from Witt, Gaither and Whitaker to Chambliss, Stophel and Bahner. The transition was smooth, she says, because the type of work she was doing didn’t have to change.
“Basically what I do is I go to court with business disputes,” she says. “About 50 percent of what I do is I go to court for employers on employment disputes, like when they get sued on gender, race or wage discrimination. And a lot of what I do is just give those employers day-to-day advice, which, in this climate, is a big deal because people are unwillingly having to lay off folks.”
Bryan says the current
economy has created more work for attorneys like her because a lot of people have had to cut back, lay off or rearrange jobs within their companies. Many consult with their attorneys to ensure these actions are being done legally, properly and in a way that affects the least amount of people.
She is also greatly enjoying being a part of the Chambliss, Stophel and Bahner family. It is considerably bigger than Witt, Gaither and Whitaker, and she enjoys the perks of the broader client base.
“All lawyers need to be working on getting clients and getting work,” she says. “But this firm is established and there’s a lot of work. It’s not like being a solo practitioner and having to pound the pavement.”
More than that, Bryan simply loves the firm. She has a great relationship with her
colleagues and appreciates the firm’s ability to balance thoughtfulness and caring with being in business.
“I love it here,” she says. “It’s just astounding.”
Perhaps what’s more astounding is Bryan’s reflection on her life - coming from Germany as a child to being raised on a Mennonite turkey farm; working her way through undergrad as a secretary and, upon inspiration, attending law school. And she did all this at a time when women were far from the majority in the legal profession.
“One of the questions I’m always asked is, as a female lawyer in the South in 1984, was that difficult? And I mean, my honest answer is no. There are challenges you face every day (whether it’s) 1984 or 2009,” she says. “A lot of times, I think barriers exist and if you just sort of refuse to acknowledge them, they go away.”
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