Miller & Martin at 150: Chattanooga's biggest law firm reaches a milestone

From left, Miller & Martin attorneys Lynzi Archibald, Laura Ketcham, Leah Gerbitz, April Holland, David Spiller, Varsha Ghodasra, James Williams, Mark Degler, Richard Rose, Christie Burbank and Karen Smith.

With 125 lawyers at offices in four cities, Miller & Martin is not only one of the biggest law firms in the Southeast, it is the oldest law firm in Chattanooga where it is headquartered and derives the biggest share of its business.

But the practice actually began in Athens, Tennessee, in 1867, just a couple of years after the end of the Civil War when Col. T.M. Burkett opened the law practice in McMinn County. The firm later moved to Chattanooga and became the law firm for Volunteer State Life & Accident Insurance Co.

When Volunteer State Life built its corporate headquarters in Chattanooga in 1917, Miller & Martin moved its offices and the firm into the Volunteer building. The firm has remained in the historic 12-story building ever since as an anchor of downtown Chattanooga.

Miller & Martin this year celebrates its sesquicentennial, or 150th anniversary, in business and its centennial, or 100th, anniversary, in its current location in the downtown Volunteer Building.

Jim Haley, the chairman of Miller & Martin who joined the firm when it had just 17 lawyers in 1975, is looking to continue to grow the firm, especially in other Southeastern markets.

"We had a great foundation with the early leaders of this firm and they, and others who followed, have always been very careful in who they have added along the way," Haley says."We'd like to continue to grow on that tradition and replicate in other markets we are in what we have here in Chattanooga with our core business commercial and litigation practice."

Volunteer roots

Volunteer State Life, which Miller & Martin represented in its early days, was ultimately acquired and merged with Chubb Corp., in 1984 and later vacated the Volunteer building. But Miller & Martin has remained and has grown to occupy the top half of the building.

From Miller & Martin's top floor conference room, named for one its clients and its building landlord, former Chattanooga mayor and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, the law firm's members have watched and helped shape much of Chattanooga's business growth.

Miller & Martin has represented many of Chattanooga's best-known companies through the years, including Krystal, American National Bank (now SunTrust), Chattem Inc., Fletcher Bright Co., Playcore and Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant Group Inc., among many others.

"We really were able to participate and share in Chattanooga's growth," says Lowry F. Kline, who joined Miller & Martin in 1965 when the firm had just 10 attorneys.

But the firm also grew from its local roots into a major regional and even national player through the years as the legal representatives at different times for many of the world's biggest Coca-Cola bottling companies, Delta Airlines, Tyson Foods, and other businesses that grew out of Chattanooga ties.

Firm sprouts CEOs

Kline himself left Miller & Martin from 1991 to 2008 to take on top jobs with Coca-Cola Enterprises in Atlanta, including serving as CEO and later chairman of the world's biggest Coke bottler in Atlanta before returning to Miller & Martin in Chattanooga nearly a decade ago. Kline is among a handful of lawyers at Miller & Martin who have gone on to head or serve as chief counsel for major U.S. companies.

Through the years, Miller & Martin has provided legal assistance with hundreds of business acquisitions around the globe for growing businesses the firm has represented as a full-service business law firm.

"To be a successful lawyer, you really have to get along with people, whether you are a litigator or a business and corporate attorney, and you need to analyze information and assess the facts to make good decisions," Lowry says. "All good lawyers have those abilities and they are certainly key attributes as well in being an effective CEO."

Miller & Martin has also been a talent source for many judges and magistrates in Chattanooga, including three District Court judges, two bankruptcy court judges and four federal magistrates.

Bank shots

For all its success in helping and staffing growing businesses, Miller & Martin gained much of its modern-day growth from the bank and savings and loan failures a generation ago. When the former Hamilton National Bank collapsed in 1976 in what was then the fourth biggest bank failure in U.S. history, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., took over the failed assets of the bank and hired Miller & Martin to help liquidate and recover assets not purchased by First Tennessee Bank when it took over the failed Hamilton National.

The success in handling those claims led Miller & Martin to be selected by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., for similar recovery and liquidation work at a number of failed Texas thrifts and again by the FDIC after the failure in the early 1980s of the United American Bank and 10 other banks and a thrift company run by Jake and C.H. Butcher in Tennessee.

"There were three or four iterations of work with different regulators, all stemming from our initial work on the Hamilton National Bank failure," attorney Hugh Sharber recalls.

Banking and financial regulation law has long been a strength of Miller & Martin, which in addition to American National has represented Bank of America, Synovus, First Security Group and others.

"Over the years, we would be called upon by banks in Chicago, Atlanta and other major cities when they had legal matters they needed help with; and I think that banking experience and reputation has been very helpful in getting other business as well," says Haley.

Expanding to other cities

As Miller and Martin grew in the 1980 and 1990s, the law firm decided to open an office outside of Chattanooga for the first time and in 1996 the firm expanded into the Nashville market. The Nashville office was more that doubled in size in 1999 through the purchase of the former Trabue, Sturdivant & Dewitt.

That same year, Miller & Martin expanded to Atlanta, in part to help serve its Coca-Cola bottling clients, by merging with five former partners of the Atlanta firm Glass McCullough Sherrill & Harrold.

In 2016, the law firm opened an office in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The firm also grew its employment and labor practices business through its 1987 merger with the former Clements, Ingham and Trumpeter law firm in Chattanooga.

Miller & Martin grew to nearly 180 attorneys five years ago, but in June 2012, Miller & Martin lost most of its staff in Nashville in a shake-up that lead 37 attorneys to leave the firm and join Mississippi-based Butler Snow's Nashville practice. Haley said there were differences over approaches and philosophy, but he hopes to grow back the firm's presence in Tennessee's capital city.

In a consolidating industry, other regional law firms have approached Miller & Martin about mergers, but Haley said to date none of the offers have made sense in enhancing the reputation and philosophy of the brand Miller & Martin has built up over the past century and a half.

"It's just never made sense to us - yet," Haley says.

Miller & Martin is a member of the World Law Group, an international network of independent law firms.

Miller Center, park legacy

For all of its national and global growth and connections, Miller & Martin has left its mark in philanthropy in its hometown and at the universities where its early partners graduated.

Miller Park and Miller Plaza in downtown Chattanooga are named for Burkett Miller, a 1914 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School who was the great nephew of founding partner Col. Burkett. Miller practiced law in Chattanooga from 1914 until his death in 1977.

Miller found partisan politics unsettling, so he helped create the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, which the law firm continues to support. The $76-million endowment at the Miller Center underwrites programs specializing in presidential scholarship, public policy and political history.