High Profile: Richard Abe Williams

This Texas-born and ‘gradually retired’ lawyer recalls two firms’ successful fusion as he receives a top Jewish Federation award for community service.

“Building a big, successful law firm was always a dream of mine. Not by myself, but to team up with other people and build a great law firm, with the help of a lot of talented people, was something I always wanted to do.”
“Building a big, successful law firm was always a dream of mine. Not by myself, but to team up with other people and build a great law firm, with the help of a lot of talented people, was something I always wanted to do.”

If things had happened slightly differently, Dick Williams' byline might have appeared on the front page of a Texas sports section, perhaps just as prominent as those of Skip Bayless and the late Blackie Sherrod.

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“I don’t consider myself a great fundraiser, but I think I understand the process fairly well… as a lawyer, I’m a big believer in process.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Dick Williams

• DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: July 8, 1934, Fort Worth

• FAVORITE COLOR: blue

• FAVORITE JUNK FOOD: peanuts

• I ABSOLUTELY WON'T EAT cooked broccoli.

• THE MENU FOR MY LAST MEAL: Indian food

• THE PEOPLE I'M MOST COMFORTABLE WITH: lawyers

• I LIKE TO WEAR shorts.

• I NEVER WEAR suspenders.

• GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein

• THE LAWYERS I MOST ADMIRE: Edward L. Wright, Maurice Mitchell and Ed Lester

• IN THE SHOWER, I SING "Singin' in the Rain."

• IF THERE'S ONE THING I'VE LEARNED IT'S THAT there are two sides to every question.

• PEOPLE IN HIGH SCHOOL DESCRIBED ME AS quiet.

• MY PARENTS WOULD DESCRIBE ME AS intelligent.

• I WANT MY CHILDREN TO REMEMBER TO work hard.

• BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED: Think before you speak.

• MY PET PEEVE: people who define success in life solely by the accumulation of wealth

• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: empathetic

Or he might have ended up as a fabled foreign correspondent, flashing breaking stories out of the great capitals of Europe.

A trifecta of circumstances diverted him instead into law. And Williams ended up, not in London or Paris, but in Little Rock, where he co-founded one of the city's most prominent law firms.

And he's receiving a major award this evening from the Jewish Federation of Arkansas for nearly 60 years of public service.

He's the federation's grand honoree at its 13th annual Jane B. Mendel Tikkun Olam Awards at the Little Rock Marriott, West Markham and Louisiana streets. The awards ceremony will also honor outstanding volunteers in the foundation's component synagogues and organizations.

Richard A. Williams, 82, is now "of counsel" for the law firm of Mitchell, Williams, Selig, Gates and Woodyard PLLC. "'Of counsel' means whatever you want it to mean," he says. "In general, it means you are not a partner, and you're not exactly an employee, either. You're an independent contractor.

"I am fully retired. I don't engage in any law practice, alone, anymore. I may sit in [on a case], which I will do later this afternoon," he said during an interview earlier this month. "I have become a mentor. Actually, I've spent most of my life being a mentor, but now I'm a mentor in a different sense now."

He still has an office in the firm's expansive diggings on the 18th floor of the Simmons Bank Building, Little Rock's tallest structure, but he spends very little time there.

"I don't come in to sit and bother the others who are working," he says. "If I do any work of any kind, I do it from home."

As a teenager, back before newsrooms had fax machines and computers, Williams worked part time as a sports writer, in high school and at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was campus correspondent for The Associated Press and sports editor of The Daily Texan.

"I had ambitions of being a journalist," he says. "My first love was sports writing, but then, working for The Associated Press, I got involved in political writing, and then decided I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. The idea of living in Paris or London appealed to me at the time."

However, several things happened simultaneously. For one, Williams says he recognized that he was not ever going to be as good as he wanted to be.

"I felt that I was good enough to work for the Austin bureau of the [Associated Press], and was in fact offered a job at the Dallas bureau when I graduated," he says. "It was quite unusual -- the AP does not offer jobs to students right out of school -- but I had worked with them for three years, and they had seen my work, and my boss, the bureau chief, touted me."

But Williams decided that it didn't pay enough. "The AP still has the reputation of being very frugal." As an example, Williams recalls what he felt was a meager result of a scoop he got through a young woman on The Daily Texan sports staff.

"She was a pretty blonde who liked football players, and football players liked her, and she had a lot of friends on the football team," he explains. "And she told me one night that the all-American guard had been kicked out of the dormitory for an infraction. Today an 'infraction' is, you commit murder or something, but in those days an infraction was coming in late.

"She told me this about 11 at night, and it was my job to track this down. I called the coach at home, and told him, 'I understand that Herbie Gray was kicked off the team because of rules infractions,' and he confirmed the story," Williams continues.

"I picked up the telephone and called Dallas and I gave them the story. And they ran with [it] about 1 a.m., which was after most of the local dailies, at least the Austin paper, had gone to bed. The next morning, this was in the Dallas paper, the San Antonio paper, the Houston paper, but it was not in the Austin paper. Can you imagine the embarrassment?"

A few days later, he got a $15 check from the AP office in Dallas. "I had worked kind of hard on the story and thought I'd done a good job and wasn't sure that $15 was much compensation. It's like $150 now. Anyway, I went to my bureau chief, and he said, 'Oh my God, the AP never sends a bonus to anybody for anything."'

And, he admits, "to be a little more introspective, I decided that being a writer was more voyeuristic than I wanted to be. I wanted to have people write things about me instead of writing things about other people."

He also felt that his writing abilities didn't match up against some of his friends and classmates.

"I decided I was kind of workmanlike -- AP loved me because I could grind out a story fast, but I wasn't going to win any Pulitzer Prizes," he says.

LEANING TOWARD LAW

Williams says he had the good fortune of going to school with some enormously talented people. Willie Morris, who became the editor of Harper's at age 29, was a year behind him, but they were good friends.

Another classmate, Thomas Thompson, became a noteworthy journalist and author; his 1982 New York Times obituary notes he was a reporter and editor with the now-defunct Houston Press before spending 11 years at Life magazine and writing six successful books, including the novels Blood and Money, Serpentine and Celebrity. "We competed against one another, as writers are wont to do," Williams recalls.

Meanwhile, he was beginning to develop an interest in international law, after "purely by chance" taking a class in it during his junior year.

"I said all my life I didn't want to be a lawyer; I thought it was boring," he says. "I had visions of the practice of law as reading abstracts all day long or something like that. Plus my father was a lawyer and he died young, and when I was a child I thought the law practice killed him. When you're 5 years old, you have thoughts like that."

After graduation, he diverted to the University of Texas Law School, "to my great good fortune."

He also proved to be fortunate in the kind of career he had after he got out.

"There are lots of kinds of lawyers that I would not have enjoyed being," he says. "I have lived a charmed life. I got accidentally thrown into tax law, which I did not think I would enjoy as much as I have.

"Most of what I did as a lawyer involved people. I did not work for corporations; I represented people with family problems, and everybody has family problems. I tell them how to dispose of their wealth in light of problems with their children, or sometimes their [spouse]."

A TAXING JOB MARKET

Williams, who was born in Fort Worth, moved at age 13 -- after his mother remarried -- to LaGrange, Texas -- the true-life setting of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. He was confirmed, but not bar-mitzvahed, at a temple in Waco. "I never had a bar mitzvah," he says. "Extreme reform [Judaism] kind of did away with bar mitzvah, and I was part of that movement. That's the kind we have in Little Rock."

Even so, he bumped up against extreme anti-Semitism as a newly minted law school grad in 1958 when he started looking for a job in some of Texas' bigger cities. The experience completely soured him on the thought of practicing law in Texas.

"In the 1950s, there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the legal profession in Texas," he says, and you can hear the lingering bitterness in his voice. "Not in Arkansas. That surprises everybody. I never encountered one bit of it in Arkansas.

"I interviewed with a major law firm in Houston only because they didn't know I was Jewish. It's one thing if they interview you and say they don't want to hire you. It's something else if they say they won't interview you. Especially if you're otherwise qualified, you have the grades, and all that kind of stuff. It angered me considerably.

"Within five years it had all changed, but that's the way it was."

Williams had married Ann Feinstein, a scion of the Pfeifer Brothers Department Store family, the summer before he entered law school, and they spent several holidays in her hometown of Little Rock. After a three-year stint in Washington, where Williams worked for two years in the office of chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service and one year clerking for a tax court judge, they moved to Arkansas in 1961.

Originally planning to join the firm of Charles Eichenbaum, a Pfeifer family friend who represented most of the Jewish businesses in Arkansas, he changed his mind at the last minute and instead accepted an offer from Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, as their only tax lawyer.

"I did what we call 'controversy work.' That's a shorthand term for when the IRS comes after you. I did a lot of that; I did a lot of estate planning."

In 1975, he left to form his own firm, which over the next five years became Williams, Selig, Overbey & Sayre.

"I just wanted to see if I could make it on my own," he says. "I decided that, yes, I could, although after five years on my own I decided to merge with somebody else."

On New Year's Day in 1981, they merged with the firm that H. Maurice Mitchell had founded in 1954 as Lasley, Spitzberg, Mitchell & Hays, and that's probably what he counts as his greatest accomplishment in more than 50 years as a lawyer.

"The thing I'm most proud of is the creation of this law firm with Maurice Mitchell and John Selig," he says. "We took a law firm -- they had 13 [lawyers], we had five, so it started with 18. We're at about 95 right now.

"Building a big, successful law firm was always a dream of mine. Not by myself, but to team up with other people and build a great law firm, with the help of a lot of talented people, was something I always wanted to do."

Williams started to scale down as a practicing lawyer, what he calls "a gradual retirement," in 1998, and finished up the process in about 2010.

"I wanted to turn my clients over on a logical basis and not just abandon them," he says.

A GRAND SURPRISE

But Williams remains busy.

He was on the Easter Seals board for 16 years. "I was instrumental in having them move from their old facilities on Lee Avenue near the Deaf School to nice new facilities off of Cantrell Road," he says. "I was heavily involved in the fundraising for that."

He's also on the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Foundation Fund Board and Pulaski Technical College Development Foundation Board. He's also involved in LifeQuest of Arkansas, where he is co-chairman of the curriculum committee and lectures regularly.

He doesn't lecture on law, however. "I draw the line there," he says. "I did that for too many years, I'm tired of it." Instead, he lectures on history.

"The Civil War is of great interest to me, but no battles -- it's the political history of the Civil War that interests me. The Lincoln assassination is one area that I'm very much involved in studying. I never joined the Civil War Roundtable. Those guys are too much involved with battles. The battles bore me. It's the political machinations that intrigue me."

"I've known Dick since before I came to LifeQuest in 2008," says executive director Ann Leek. "He's been a very active member of our board of directors, and a real key person for me in terms of going out for grant and sponsorship opportunities."

She says he was especially helpful in establishing a relationship with the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, coordinating some lectures to build awareness of the community and the resources that the Mosaic Templars had and LifeQuest didn't.

"He's always good at helping get things done -- a real can-do kind of guy. He has a group of cronies, lawyers, judges, different people in that area, and they put together an eight-week course every term with some theme -- fascinating women of the '40s, great tycoons, famous murders" -- the current subject, Leek adds. Starting in mid-January, they'll offer an eight-week course titled "Early Hollywood: The Producers."

Williams and his wife are members of Little Rock's Temple B'Nai Israel, and "we're involved with temple things. But we just don't go a lot." Ann, formerly Ann Feinstein, and the couple's daughter, Jill Ricciardone, own and operate Feinstein's, a women's clothing store in the Heights. It was started by Ann's father 60 years ago, Williams says. The couple have three sons, as well: Mark of Calgary, Alberta; Robert of Little Rock; Lawrence of Tiburon, Calif.

Williams was co-chairman of the temple's 150th year anniversary celebration earlier this year and headed the Jewish Federation for a year in 1967, coinciding with Israel's Six Day War.

He says he was "absolutely shocked" to learn about the federation's honor that he's receiving tonight.

"And I don't feel I got this award because of what I did for the Jewish community; I think it was clear to me that award was given because of my work within the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community, statewide and nationally."

"Dick was nominated for his commitment to and leadership in our community, both the Jewish and broader communities," confirms Marianne Tettlebaum, director of the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. His nomination came from the federation's Tikkun Olam Task Force, which is a group of board members and volunteers, all of whom have extensive experience chairing the Tikkun Olam event and many of whom are themselves former grand honorees.

"I don't consider myself a great fundraiser, but I think I understand the process fairly well," Williams says. "You cannot be a good fundraiser unless you're a big giver yourself, and I'm not that.

"But as a lawyer, I'm a big believer in process."

High Profile on 09/25/2016

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