Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006130476
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGIE FISHER RICHMOND BUREAU
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
RICHMOND - It was just a bit of whimsy, contributed by Richmonder Drew Williams, to Style's annual "You are Very Richmond if . . ." contest.
But Williams - a training consultant with no connection to Hunton & Williams, despite the last name - offered a bon mot that summarized years of conjecture, speculation and inside jokes about the intricate relations among the powers of Virginia's political and corporate structures and the huge, blue-stocking law firm.
It's easy to understand the close links between Hunton & Williams and big corporate clients such as Dominion Resources, the holding company for Virginia Power, which used to be Virginia Electric and Power Co. and is still called Vepco by its customers.
The connection between the firm and state government is more esoteric. As several sources in the political and legal fields suggested, it's like a gossamer cobweb - not easily seen, although most everybody knows it's there.
The Main Street law firm, founded by four attorneys at the turn of the century, grew in lockstep with the utility, railroads, banks and businesses that were bringing Virginia out of the poverty that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In fact, some early managerial meetings might have been held in a revolving door.
T. Justin Moore, for instance, was general counsel at Vepco and retained that position after he joined the firm in 1930 and helped it to establish a nationwide expertise in utility law. His son, T. Justin Moore Jr., went from Hunton & Williams, where he represented Vepco in rate issues, to become Vepco's president and chief executive officer. He returned to Hunton & Williams in 1985.
Eppa Hunton Jr., one of the firm's founders, was actively involved in many railroad mergers around the nation.
Since opening its doors in 1901, the firm has become a massive law factory. It has 434 lawyers, 227 of whom work in the firm's honeycomb-like headquarters spread over 11 floors in a downtown office building here. There are eight other offices, in Fairfax; Norfolk; New York; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Raleigh, N.C.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and a new European office in Brussels, Belgium, which symbolizes the firm's international ventures of recent years.
By far the largest law firm in Virginia and the Southeast as a whole, Hunton & Williams is the 22nd largest in the nation. Managing partner W. Taylor Reveley III said the firm has annual gross revenue of "well over $100 million."
For fees sometimes topping $200 an hour, its attorneys handle the legal affairs for numerous Fortune 500 companies.
Because many of its biggest clients can be affected, financially and otherwise, by laws and policies established by government, Hunton & Williams has had a hand in shaping those laws and policies at both the state and federal level.
But in contrast to other large law firms, including several in Richmond, Hunton & Williams has always kept a low political profile.
One measure of that is contributions to political candidates. Hunton & Williams is no slouch, but it lags behind the political spending of its nearest competitor, McGuire Woods and Battle of Richmond. McGuire Woods is the state's second-largest law firm and the nation's 54th largest.
Lobbying for clients at the General Assembly is another way that law firms exert political influence. Here, too, Hunton & Williams has not been in the league with such firms as McGuire Woods and Battle; Mays and Valentine; or Hazel, Thomas, Fiske, Beckhorn and Hanes - to mention a few highly visible lobbying firms.
"I don't think there's any doubt that our profile in the Virginia General Assembly has been lower than a number of other law firms," Reveley said. T. Justin Moore Jr., whose memory is a storehouse for much of the firm's colorful history, suggested this explanation:
Lobbying used to be "looked on as sort of a second-rate thing to do. No true-blue lawyers lobbied."
So Hunton & Williams lawyers tended to ignore the assembly - so much so that some legislators and others were surprised when the firm galvanized its resources to help draft and get passed a package of tort reform laws a few years ago.
But several legislators and lawyers with other firms said that Hunton & Williams' low visibility in elections and at the assembly is an irrelevant measure of its influence on state government.
Outsiders say that over the years the firm has been the ghostwriter for most of state law dealing with utilities and public financing and that it has also played a major behind-the-scenes role in developing tax, environmental, corporation and labor policies and statutes.
Don Lemons of Durrette, Irvin & Lemons of Richmond said Hunton & Williams is "probably more involved in state government than anybody can imagine." But its role "is more sophisticated than just lobbying at the General Assembly. You get the idea that the involvement Hunton & Williams has is through the executive branch."
Although the firm tends to stay in the background, many of its senior lawyers have long been part of the brain trust that has advised Republican and Democratic governors and other political leaders.
And they are widely recognized as the sparkplugs of an old-boy network in Virginia that shapes public opinion on political decisions.
In a recently published book about Hunton & Williams, "The Style of a Law Firm" by Anne Hobson Freeman, T. Justin Moore Jr. provided a glimmer of that involvement in this reminiscence about his late father:
"He practically invented utility corporate law in Virginia and wrote some of the early part of the corporation code, . . . and the public utility law and that famous rule about the right-to-work law and no striking against public utilities. He wrote a lot of that when Bill Tuck was governor of Virginia. . . . They got away with that largely by his legal skill and Bill Tuck's ability to bluff."
The senior Moore - along with another deceased Hunton & Williams partner, John Riely, and others from the firm - was also at the eye of the storm over massive resistance to school integration in the 1950s.
The state hired Moore in 1951 to defend the Prince Edward County School Board in a legal challenge to the state's segregated school system. In Freeman's book, Moore junior recalled that nobody wanted to take the case, but Gov. John Battle and Sen. Harry F. Byrd persuaded his father and Hunton & Williams to handle it.
Virginia, of course, lost when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 outlawed segregation in public schools in all states.
A quarter of a century after it had tried to defend segregation, Hunton & Williams hired John Charles Thomas as its first black lawyer. In 1982, it elevated him to partner, which was reported at the time as the first predominantly white legal firm in the South to promote a black to that status.
A year later, Gov. Charles Robb chose Thomas to be the first black member of the Virginia Supreme Court.
Thomas, who left the Virginia Supreme Court last year citing health reasons, has now returned to Hunton & Williams, where he is involved, among other things, in minority recruitment.
In a recent interview, Thomas talked about the "attitudinal changes" he has seen at the firm.
"Before I came here, this firm and many firms in the South were essentially homogeneous" - basically all white, all male. So it was "a pretty big deal" when the firm that had argued the Virginia case for massive resistance became the first in the South to have a black partner born in Virginia, Thomas said.
Hunton & Williams now has 11 women partners and 103 women associates and has three black partners and eight black associates.
Robb, now Virginia's junior U.S. senator, joined Hunton & Williams when he left the governor's office in 1986. The firm was a perch for him to rest on before getting back into elective politics.
With his stature as a nationally prominent politician, Robb was a "rainmaker" for the firm. His travels abroad to expand his political horizons coincided nicely with Hunton & Williams' desire to expand into international law.
Earlier this year, Gerald Baliles also moved from the governor's mansion to an office at Hunton & Williams.
Some legislators and lobbyists point to the Robb-Baliles connection as evidence of a special relation that Hunton & Williams has always had with the governor's office. But, there is "really no institutional relationship," Robb said in a recent interview.
In fact, Robb said one of the reasons he had decided to go with Hunton & Williams was that it had kept such a "discreet, low profile" politically.
Robb spent much of his time while at the firm building the Democratic Leadership Council and urging the national Democratic Party to take a more centrist approach. But he also said he appreciated that Hunton & Williams had no coloration as a Democratic-leaning firm.
The firm readily boasts, in recruitment brochures and otherwise, that its celebrities have links with all branches of government and both parties.
Probably its most famous lawyer is retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., whose son, Lewis F. Powell III, now is a Hunton & Williams partner and chairman of its pro bono committee.
The younger Powell has just launched a novel experiment that has attracted wide media attention: The elite firm is opening up what is essentially a storefront office in Church Hill, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Richmond, where it will offer free legal to people who don't qualify for free assistance from government-sponsored legal aid programs.
Political connections, it's got. But "we are by no stretch of the imagination a political law firm," said Reveley, its managing partner.
by CNB