SCLAWYERSWEEKLY.COM VOLUME 20 NUMBER 14 ■
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BEING FLEXIBLE
Columbia attorney elected to state Supreme Court board post ■ BY JASON THOMAS jthomas@scbiznews.com
Team members gather in Womble Bond Dickinson’s Greenville, S.C., office. Photo courtesy of Womble Bond Dickinson
Law firms adjust to a post-Covid workplace ■ BY TERI SAYLOR Correspondent Greg Strickland chuckles when he recalls the extraordinary measures his law firm’s residential real estate attorneys took just to collect signatures on closing packages when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down businesses everywhere in 2020. As firm administrator at Ragsdale Liggett in Raleigh, Strickland describes an odd scene of vehicles lined up outside the firm’s office as new homeowners and attorneys, clad in masks and gloves, completed closings through car windows. “Normally, our real estate practice does about 200 home closings a month, which means there are 200 groups of buyers and sellers, family
From left: Jenny Baker, paralegal; Joe Raad, attorney; and Nikki Harris, office administrator, often work remotely, but enjoy gathering at the Morton & Gettys office on occasion post-pandemic. Photo by Robin Owens
members and kids who come into our office, but for a year-and-a-half we didn’t see any of them,” he said in a recent phone interview.
Instead, attorneys got creative and found a way to change all their processes. Clients would pull up in the parking lot, call the office to say they were downstairs, and their lawyers would take their closing packages to their car window and hand them over, along with their phone number to call if they have questions, Strickland said. “It was the wildest thing to see,” he said. “It was just lawyers down there with clipboards helping people purchase $500,000 homes while sitting in their cars.” Now, two years later, Ragsdale Liggett and other firms are finding their way to a new normal, no longer S e e Po s t - Cov i d P a g e 5 ►
Columbia, S.C.-based Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd P.A. announced in a news release that Ron Scott was elected to serve a three-year term on the Board of Directors for the South Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society. The South Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society’s mission is to study, preserve, and collect the history of the courts, the judiciary, the legal profession, the judicial deve- Ron Scott lopment of the rule of law, and judicial independence in South Carolina, as well as to educate the public about that history, according to the release. Active in the community, Scott also serves on the boards for Prisma Health – Midlands, Prisma Health Richland Memorial Hospital and the Midlands Education and Business Alliance (MEBA), the release stated. Scott’s practice focuses on public finance, planning and zoning, local government and economic development matters. He also serves as bond counsel to housing developers for low-income housing projects assisted through state and federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) and as issuer’s counsel to local public housing authorities for private activity housing revenue bonds, according to the release. Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd provides business, litigation and financial legal services to local, national and international clients, and is one of the largest law firms in South Carolina.
‘Broad powers’ apply to residuary estate ■ BY HEATH HAMACHER The personal representatives of a woman’s estate did not breach a fiduciary duty when they used their broad discretion to make distributions under a will’s residuary clause, a divided South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled. The June 15 ruling reverses the state’s Court of Appeals, which upheld a probate court’s finding that a section of the will governed only the distribution of specific assets and did not apply to the residuary estate. Justice Kaye Hearn wrote for the high court that
nothing in the will or jurisprudence states the broad powers are limited to specific requests. She called the lower courts’ conclusion “exactly backwards.” “The personal representatives were bound to carry out the specific requests in the will and, despite the broad grant of authority in § 10.6, they had no discretion to alter them,” Hearn wrote. “Rather than not applying to the distribution of the residuary estate, it is clear this is precisely where those broad powers could be exercised.” Chief Justice Donald Beatty and Justices John Few and George James concurred in the decision.
Receiving the residual
Testatrix Jacquelin Stevenson died in 2007 and left behind six children: four from her marriage to Thomas Stevenson, a son from a previous marriage, and a stepdaughter (Stevenson’s daughter from a previous marriage). Her last will and testament devised all real property in her estate to her four children by Stevenson and made bequests of $400,000 to the stepdaughter, respondent Genevieve Felder, and James King, her son from the previous marriage. In addition to the real property—houses in S e e B r o a d Po w e r s P a g e 6 ►
INSIDE VERDICTS & SETTLEMENTS
VERDICTS & SETTLEMENTS
COMMENTARY
Medical transport company to pay $2.5M in negligence claim
Estate of man paralyzed, killed settles for $4.5M
Change in user fees puts counties on a bumpy road
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