Jack Buchanan and how I came to Primerus
I have thought a great deal about Jack Buchanan these last weeks. In doing so, I found myself returning not to the end of a friendship but to the beginning of my own life in the law. The two are bound together more tightly than I had ever stopped to consider. Primerus has been with me, in one form or another, for the whole of my career. I came to see that clearly this week, and I want to tell you how.
I joined Collins & Lacy, P.C. in 2002, but my relationship with Joel Collins goes back to 1986, when I was fourteen. Joel’s son and I grew up together in Irmo, South Carolina, and we were in Boy Scouts together. That summer we both worked at Camp Barstow, and it was there, when Joel drove out to see his boy, that I first met him. He was the first lawyer I ever really knew: the first lawyer in Columbia I could picture and measure myself against. He was my idea of what a lawyer was.
When I clerked at the South Carolina Court of Appeals from 2000 to 2002, I began asking the question every clerk eventually asks: what comes next? I had always thought the world of Joel, so I wrote him a letter and asked whether we might sit down. In October of 2001, I walked the two blocks from the Court of Appeals to the offices of Collins & Lacy, a defense firm of twelve lawyers at the time, and met with Joel and the others. What I remember most clearly, nearly a quarter century later, is Joel talking at length about the firm’s membership in Primerus. He spoke about the Six Pillars. He spoke about what the organization stood for, what it meant to the profession, and how proud the firm was to belong. I had come to interview for a job. What I remember is a man telling me what kind of lawyer he intended to be, and what company he intended to keep in his firm.
I went home and wrote Joel another letter. I thanked him for the meeting, and I told him plainly how impressed I was that the firm belonged to an organization like Primerus. I did not yet have the career behind me to understand what I was saying. But the instinct was right. Belonging to something with that kind of standard was not incidental to being a good defense lawyer. It was part of it.
Fast forward to 2007 in Boca Raton, Florida. That was the first time I attended a Primerus Convocation, still a fairly new thing for our defense lawyers in those days. And it was there that I first met Jack Buchanan face to face. From that point on, I was hooked. I became an active member of this society and never looked back.
The great gift of these twenty years is this: I have built and tended to hundreds of relationships, across this country and around the world, that matter to me. Not in a transactional sense; that is a nice byproduct, but it is not the point. These are relationships from an authentic place. People who think and feel about the law the way I do. People who think the way I do about how to run a practice, how to treat one another, how to be good citizens, how to lead in their communities. That is what Primerus has meant to me. That is what it is.
So, when we gathered last year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I recognized an opportunity in front of me: to do something real to help us carry the mission and the legacy of Primerus forward. That recognition led to my conversations with Jack these past months, two hours a week, talking about what Primerus is and what it can become. Without quite realizing it, I was finishing a conversation that began in the Collins & Lacy conference room in 2001. Jack gave me the words for it. He told me the best members of Primerus do not really need it at all; he was right, and that is exactly the point. Primerus is not a crutch. It is a fellowship: the space where lawyers who have already chosen excellence find one another. Joel introduced me to that idea before I had the experience to understand it. Jack helped me articulate it just as I was being asked to lead it.
Jack was a visionary. He was a man who left a dent in the universe: with his vision, his energy, his beliefs, and his values. He founded Primerus in 1992 to restore honor and dignity to the profession of law, and he led it every day until the day he died. He built an enormous legacy, one I am honored to be part of. I know you feel the same.
Here is what I ask of you to honor Jack and this wonderful organization we know as Primerus: Do not let your membership sit in a drawer. Come to the next meeting. Build the relationships that make this organization what it is. And then go further: Lead. Lead in your firms, in your communities, and in this fellowship. The best way to honor a man who built something is to keep building it.
I look forward to working with each of you to keep the dream alive and to move our mission forward, together.
Christian Stegmaier
President and Chief Executive Officer-Designate
The International Society of Primerus Law Firms