News & Events
"Lion of Trial Bar," Bobby Lee Cook, is Orr Distinguished Lecturer Sept. 11
One of the ABA Journal’s legendary “Lions of the Trial Bar” will speak at the UT College of Law Friday, Sept. 11, as part of the College’s Wyc and Lyn Orr Lecture Series.
Bobby Lee Cook of Summerville, Ga., who over the past six decades has tried thousands of cases in more than 40 states and several countries, will lecture beginning at noon in Room 132. The television series “Matlock” was reportedly based on his practice.
The Orr lecture series is made possible by the support of E. Wycliffe Orr, Sr. and Lyn H. Orr of Gainesville, Georgia. Mr. Orr, a 1970 graduate of the UT College of Law, is a Member with Orr Brown Johnson LLP in Gainesville.
The lecture is free and open to the public. It begins at noon in Room 132.
Cook, 82 and still practicing with Cook and Connelly, is among seven attorneys tabbed as “Lions” by the ABA Journal, lawyers whose names “can be found in the pages of casebooks and on the sides of law school buildings. They’ve tried some of the most important cases of the last 50 years, dazzling juries and swaying judges.”
According to the ABA Journal, they have “also represented the guilty and unpopular because they thought it was the right thing to do.”
Cook has represented moonshiners and money launderers, bootleggers and bank fraud schemers. The Rockefellers and Carnegies have been his clients. And his defense of Savannah, Ga., socialite Jim Williams helped bring to life John Berendt’s true-crime classic “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
The Vanderbilt Law School graduate in 1986 defended Tennessee banker C.H. Butcher Jr., who faced 25 counts of fraud and was acquitted on all counts. In the 1950s he was the only lawyer in Georgia who represented unions, considered “communists” at the time. He currently represents Wayne Williams in Williams’ appeal of his 1982 conviction for the murder of two black youths in what was known as the Atlanta Child Murders.
Cook also represents three murder defendants in separate cases that will go to trial this year. He remains one of the most sought-after criminal defense lawyers in the South.
Another of the ABA Journal’s “Lions,” James Neal of Nashville, was the first speaker in the Orr Lecture Series last March.
Artwork courtesy of Trevor Goring, http://www.imagesofjustice.com.