HIGH PROFILE: Byron M. Eiseman Jr. spent 50 years teaching law students at UALR’s Bowen Law School

School’s namesake, William Bowen, brought young lawyer to Little Rock, became his mentor

“What I learned was the way to grow the law firm was not to try to dominate and hold on to all of the clients that you have and, in a tactful manner, start delegating to young lawyers and helping them build relationships with the clients.” - Byron Eiseman
“What I learned was the way to grow the law firm was not to try to dominate and hold on to all of the clients that you have and, in a tactful manner, start delegating to young lawyers and helping them build relationships with the clients.” - Byron Eiseman

Byron Eiseman's career path to Little Rock started with a practical joke played on him by a law school professor and legendary Arkansas lawyer William Bowen.

Eiseman was working on completing a degree at New York University School of Law when he wrote a letter to the Little Rock firm of Smith, Williams, Friday and Bowen asking about a position.

SELF PORTRAIT

Byron Eiseman Jr.

• DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 24, 1936, Greeneville, Tenn.

• MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME: Casanova's Big Night (not really a great movie but rather special because I saw parts of it being filmed up close at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood with stars Bob Hope and Joan Fontaine).

• THE BEST THING ABOUT LIVING IN NEW YORK WAS: The endless amusement opportunities (including an appearance on the game show Password with Carol Lawrence as my partner) to go along with a great educational experience at New York University School of Law.

• MY CHILDHOOD HERO WAS: My uncle York Quillen who was highly intelligent and a great athlete.

• THE BEST STUDENTS IN MY CLASS KNOW HOW TO: Take a set of facts involving one or more legal issues, analyze them correctly and then provide the correct answer written succinctly and clearly.

• MY BICYCLE IS A: Giant Sedona.

• IF I WASN'T A LAWYER, I WOULD BE: A sports analyst.

• MY FAVORITE SPOT IN THE WORLD IS: Hawaii, where we go annually.

• THE BEST ADVICE I'VE EVER RECEIVED WAS: From my loving mother who gave me lots of wise advice but at the top of the list was "Prayerfully read and study your Bible each day and become a wiser and more godly person."

• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Thankful.

Bowen called him and said he would travel to New York to meet him.

On the date of Bowen's arrival in the Big Apple, Eiseman had a 6 p.m. corporate tax class with NYU professor Gerald Wallace.

"I was sitting there in the classroom -- I sat on the front row -- and I saw Wallace come to class and there is some guy with him and he says 'Eiseman get over here.'"

Wallace introduced him to Bowen and mentioned that the two "threw down a couple of drinks" before class.

Bowen then told Eiseman he would see him after class, but Wallace stopped him. "No. You go sit in the back of the class. You might learn something."

"So Bowen goes to the back of the class and sits down and about two minutes into the class, Wallace starts calling on me and it's 50 minutes before the break and I was his victim for almost 50 minutes," Eiseman recalls.

"At the break, I look back and there is no Bowen and I ask one of my friends who was sitting in the back of the classroom 'Where did that guy go?' And he says 'He sat there about two minutes and he got up and left through the back door.'"

"Wallace knew that I didn't know that and I was sweating it out big time," Eiseman says with a laugh.

Eiseman graduated from NYU in 1964 with a master's degree in taxation and Bowen offered him a job and became his mentor. (Wallace died in 1991 at the age of 90. Bowen died in 2014 at the age of 91.)

In what can only be described as a perfect turn of fate, after 50 years Eiseman retired this spring as an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen Law School. And, yes, the school was named after Bill Bowen.

Eiseman continues practicing at what is now known as Friday, Eldredge & Clark. The former managing partner, Eiseman now concentrates on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures; estate planning, probate and estate administration, and taxation.

"He was someone that Hershel Friday and Buddy Sutton trusted to handle financial and tax issues for the firm," current Managing Partner Shep Russell says of two key attorneys of the Friday firm. "No decisions were made on these types of matters without running them by Byron and having him weigh in."

Eiseman and his younger brother, Quillen, are the only children of Mary and Byron Eiseman Sr. The Eisemans raised their boys in Morristown, Tenn., about 40 miles east of Knoxville. The senior Eiseman sold movie advertising film for the Alexander Film Co. until he got tired of traveling and he and a friend opened a drive-in movie theater.

"When I was a teenager, I worked in the concession stand and saw a lot of movies," Eiseman says. It was a family affair. Quillen also worked in the concession stand and their mother sold tickets.

After graduating from Morristown High School, Eiseman went to nearby Carson Newman College, now known as Carson Newman University, in Jefferson City, Tenn.

He earned his law degree from the University of Tennessee in 1960. After graduation, he decided he wanted to go into the U.S. Air Force judge advocate general (JAG) program. But it required 20/20 vision and he was disqualified.

He thought teaching might be fun so he took a job at East Carolina College -- now East Carolina University -- teaching commercial law and corporate finance.

Eiseman met his future wife, Carol -- a business professor -- at a faculty party. The day after they met, Eiseman agreed to chaperone a Sigma Nu fraternity party. He invited Carol to be his date.

"And the rest is history," Eiseman says. "It was 55 years ago."

Carol says many of their dates were supervising fraternity parties -- explaining that since they were a young couple, they were in frequent demand.

"We weren't paid a whole lot and chaperoning became a big source of entertainment for us," she says. "It was a good time."

But it wasn't such a good time at the second party they chaperoned. A frat boy backed into Eiseman's "brand new, beautiful T-bird," she says.

"It was kind of a little heartbreak for him," she says, adding the fraternity agreed to repair the car.

LITTLE ROCK BOUND

After teaching at East Carolina for two years, the Eisemans decided to move to New York so he could get a graduate degree in taxation. As he began looking for a job, Eiseman went through the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory and began looking into firms from Atlanta to Little Rock. That's when he found Smith, Williams, Friday and Bowen.

But Carol's father -- Walter B. Cole of Fayetteville -- had other ideas and lined up interviews for him at some of the biggest accounting firms in New York. Professor Cole was one of four founders of what is now known as the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

"Bowen, being the fantastic salesman that he is, just had me convinced that it was the opportunity of a lifetime at the Friday law firm, where they offered me $7,200 to come to work in 1964," Eiseman says.

While he says he and Carol loved living in New York, they didn't think it would be a good place to raise a family.

"The good Lord said go to Little Rock and I never had any regrets," he says.

The Eisemans have three children. Daughter Mary Melissa "Misty" Bane and her husband, Warren, are ministry partner development coaches at CRU (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) in the Raleigh-Chapel Hill, N.C. area. The Banes' daughter, Marissa Kronk, and her husband, Alex, recently received master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University. The Banes' second daughter, Olivia Bane, recently graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and plans to attend Wake Forest University Law School in the fall. And their son, Caleb, will be a junior at UNC majoring in management.

The Eisemans' second daughter, Robyn Eiseman Harris, is a homemaker and lives in Alpharetta, Ga. with her husband, Jason. Their daughter Sarah will be a junior at the University of South Carolina. Her brother Ben will be a freshman at the University of Virginia and will be a left-handed pitcher on the college's team.

The Eisemans' son Chris of Marina, Calif., is a teacher. He and his wife, Leilani, have one son, Jaden, who will be attending high school in the fall.

LAW SCHOOL

For half a century, Eiseman taught classes at night at the Bowen School of Law. He pulls out a large file of his class rosters and rattles off the names of some of the students who have gone on to have high-profile careers.

There's Sam Perroni, who was frequently listed as one of the state's top lawyers until health issues forced him to slow down. Then there's Catherine Hughes, Acxiom's corporate governance officer, who Eiseman described as a "brilliant student." There's Pulaski County Circuit Judge Collins Kilgore, who retired in 2014 after 24 years on the bench.

"There were so many," Eiseman says. "A lot in my first class are not still with us."

Hughes says she took Eiseman's gift and estate tax course in the mid 1970s.

"I adore Byron Eiseman. He's the classic example of a gentleman and a scholar," she says.

Hughes says there were only about 10 students in the class, which met at the old law school on Markham Street.

"I had never met him prior to taking his class, but his gracious manner and his ability to take a rather dry subject and make it fascinating left a lasting impression on me. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for him, and every time our paths cross I'm amazed that he still remembers my name after all these years. He's truly a prince of a guy."

With his first-row view, Eiseman was able to recruit some of the "very best folks out of a class." But not all of those students were skilled at tax law.

"We've hired two or three lawyers ... the only Cs they made in law school were Cs they made in my class," he says.

With 50 years under his belt, Eiseman says no other faculty member worked there "anywhere near as long." He taught on Tuesday nights from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

"At six o'clock, I would scratch my head and say 'Why in the world am I doing this?' At 9 o'clock I knew why," he says. "It was very fulfilling."

But he decided 50 years was enough.

"I just thought it was time for someone else to step up," he says. "I questioned whether I entertained the students and energized them enough."

MANAGING PARTNER

In 2005, Eiseman became the Friday firm's fifth managing partner, taking over for Buddy Sutton. Before that, Eiseman headed up the firm's tax department. He says at one time the firm did a count of the open number of files assigned to each lawyer. He had a "few thousand" open files.

As managing partner, he broke the firm into 12 practice groups and turned over a number of his clients to junior attorneys.

"What I learned was the way to grow the law firm was not to try to dominate and hold on to all of the clients that you have and, in a tactful manner, start delegating to young lawyers and helping them build relationships with the clients."

As a junior attorney, Eiseman recalls federal judges would assign him indigent clients. He says he ended up with a lot of interesting cases that he didn't feel particularly equipped -- as a tax attorney -- to handle.

He tells the story of one indigent client who was charged with stealing a car and crossing state lines. The client contended he gave a parking attendant in St. Louis a fifth of whiskey to "borrow" a parked car. He promised he would be back by 5 p.m. when the owner would pick up the car. One of his character witnesses didn't know who he was and so Eiseman called the man's girlfriend, Miss Mary.

"Miss Mary said, 'That lying SOB. I can't tell you anything good about that man."

The man also said it was his first charge, but it took a parole officer "30 minutes to read through his list of convictions."

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

In his free time, Eiseman is quite the athlete. He plays tennis twice a week at the Little Rock Athletic Club. On Monday nights, he plays doubles and on Friday mornings, he works out with a tennis pro who "runs my fanny off."

Eiseman and Russell have been weekly tennis partners for more than 20 years.

"He is highly competitive and will not give up on the ball," Russell says. "He chastises himself loudly for any unforced error on his part."

He also bicycles, loading his bike on to the back of his SUV and heading out to the Big Dam Bridge.

"I bike by myself most of the time because I like to go at my own speed," he says. "I don't mind biking with someone else, but if someone likes to go faster or slower than I do ... I know they don't like to wait on me and if they go slower, I don't like to wait on them."

He and Carol also go on a lot of vacations, including spending three weeks a year at their timeshare on the Big Island of Hawaii. He used to scuba dive, but sticks to snorkeling these days. They also take their grandchildren on frequent trips, including four trips to Europe. And he and Carol travel at least one time a year to New York to take in theater and restaurants.

In addition to the law, Eiseman also has real-estate interests. Real estate broker Dickson Flake says he, Eiseman and other partners have owned the Country Club Station Shopping Center for a number of years.

"He is probably one of the most gracious people I've ever known. I have never heard him say a critical comment about anyone. He just won't do it," Flake says. "I can't tell you how many times I've gotten off the phone with him and I will tell my wife I wish I could be more like Byron."

And it's not just business and physical activities. Carol says that her husband loves to work all types of puzzles. She says he has a "high degree of concentration" and sometimes doesn't notice what is going on around him.

"If he is watching a ballgame, the game gets his full attention. When he and his brother, Quillen, were little, his family would go on Sunday outings. While they were driving one Sunday, Byron's mother turned to look in the back seat where the boys rode. She immediately said, 'Where is Quillen?" Byron replied, 'I don't know,'" she says.

"When they stopped the car, they saw this little boy crying and running after the car. Quillen had fallen out, and Byron never noticed," she says.

Carol says her husband is a Boy Scout at heart. Eiseman served as president of the Quapaw Area Council of Boy Scouts in 2005 and 2006.

"Through the years, he has tried to capture the Eagle Scouts dedication to high ideals, self-disciple, character, optimism, determination, fairness and preparedness," Carol says. "His greatest joy comes from helping others achieve their goals, thus making it a joy to continue working at the Friday Law Firm."

photo

“At 6 o’clock, I would scratch my head and say ‘Why in the world am I doing this?’ At 9 o’clock I knew why. It was very fulfilling.” -Byron Eiseman Jr.

High Profile on 06/17/2018

Upcoming Events