BusinessTN

When his clients in a medical malpractice case won the largest damages award in the history of Maury County's courts last March, Gayle Malone Jr. enjoyed the satisfaction of a hard-earned victory. But he also knew what it was like to represent defendants accused of causing harm, and even how it felt to be the man in the middle of a bitter legal dispute, guiding the two sides toward an out-of-court resolution.

The $5.5 million judgment Malone obtained for Columbia residents Arnette and Greg Zapel was one more high point in a 36-year career marked by many distinctions. The jury found that a pathology lab was liable after it failed to detect Ms. Zapel's cancer when interpreting pap smear results.

Malone, a partner at Nashville's Walker, Tipps & Malone PLC, is equally comfortable representing both defendants and plaintiffs, in both business and personal-injury litigation, while up to a quarter of his practice now consists of mediations.

He clearly has a talent for seeing different sides of an issue, and so it's not surprising to hear him speak simultaneously of how much he enjoys the part of his job that keeps cases from going to trial and how concerned he is about what many have called the "vanishing jury trial system."

When Malone got his start in the legal trade after graduating from Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1973, lawsuits routinely went to trial. With relatively simple issues at stake, those trials were often no more than two days in length, and a litigator could expect to do battle several times a month. Nowadays, it's all different -- though the lawsuits that do make it to trial tend to make for stimulating work.

"The cases I get now are complicated, complex and very interesting," Malone says. "There's a lot of intellectual challenge associated with most every one that I have." Meanwhile, the time he spends traveling around the state to conduct mediations is "a throwback to the 1970s and early '80s, when you tried a lot of cases and saw a lot of lawyers, much more so than you do now," he says.

So he's personally fulfilled. Yet Malone expresses misgivings about a consequence of the changes he has witnessed -- and has himself furthered. "We have the best jury trial system in the world," he says. "I fear sometimes that we are moving away from that system to other modes of resolution. They may be simpler, may be quicker, but I'm not sure they are at all times in the best interest of the parties to the litigation or our country at large."

The attorney wonders aloud how younger generations of trial lawyers will acquire the acumen it takes to succeed as a litigator.

"Without the experience of trying large numbers of cases, it's more difficult to develop and sharpen the skills necessary to be a solid trial lawyer," he says.

"Our system is adversarial, and we need good lawyers who can try cases."