Tenn. High Court to Hear About Fiery 25-Year Law Firm-Judge Spat
After 25 years of periodic dispute between a Greeneville, Tenn., law firm and a local Greene County judge, the situation has heated up to a point where the state supreme court is about to weigh in.
The law firm, which is one of the largest in Greeneville, is asking the Supreme Court of Tennessee to disqualify Circuit Judge John Wilson from hearing any case in which one of its attorneys is involved, and the court is scheduled to conduct a hearing on the issue tomorrow, reports the Greeneville Sun. Wilson, meanwhile, says he has done nothing wrong when hearing the law firm’s cases, and he questions the law firm’s motives.
The dispute has its roots in the 1982 election of attorney C. Berkeley Bell Jr., who previously practiced with the law firm’s John T. Milburn Rogers, as district attorney general of the Third Judicial Circuit. “Since that time, a conflagration has erupted periodically in that judicial circuit involving Judge John K. Wilson, attorney John T. Milburn Rogers, and members of the Greeneville law firm Rogers, Laughlin, Nunnally, Hood & Crum,” the firm writes in its petition to the court.
Specifically, the Rogers firm contends, Wilson took a dislike to Bell and Rogers after Bell refused to transfer a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent out of the district in 1982. The judge and the law firm apparently managed to get along well enough to work on the same cases, however, until the mid-1990s.
In about 1996, Rogers asked the state supreme court to require Wilson to render a decision on a motion that he said had been pending for 10 months or recuse himself, according to the newspaper article. And in 1997, the law firm made a judicial conduct complaint against Wilson, which apparently was privately resolved.
For about a decade after that, Wilson had not had substantive contact with the law firm’s cases, but then a new computerized assignment system changed the situation in 2007. The firm then sought, unsuccessfully, to have the circuit’s two other judges hear its cases, first asking Wilson to recuse himself and then asking the presiding judge to intervene.
