Currently, I am occupying that liminal space between juggling my professional life and personal/family life AND a full-bore retirement on January 1, 2025, from my life as a surety and fidelity lawyer. While such transitions are often filled with anxiety, ambiguity, and confusion, I am experiencing none of that business. I have been fortunate indeed to have enjoyed a varied and fulfilling professional life as a lawyer—federal law clerk, private practice litigator and advocate, trade association counsel, author, speaker, AAA arbitrator, and advisor--with so many fascinating clients, colleagues, and confederates. I am grateful for the good fortune to have been blessed with so many wonderful relationships during the course of my career.
With this transition I can now focus all my considerable energy on my personal life--my husband, my children, and my grandchildren—and my friends, in which category I include my two dogs. I eagerly embrace the next adventures.
You hear it all the time: surety is a relationship business. And so it is in life. But let’s be real: “relationship business” can be applied generally to every aspect of our lives. Relationships can be placed on a continuum--from warm, caring, loving, empathetic, concerned, respectful, supportive, all the way to toxic, deceitful, mendacious, unscrupulous, unprincipled, hateful, disastrous. I think we can all agree the end of the continuum on which we want our relationships, professional and personal, to land.
While it wasn’t inevitable, it was likely that I would become a lawyer. My father, Bob Scott, was a lawyer; my brother, Scott, is a lawyer; my cousin, Bob, is a lawyer; my cousin, Martha, is a lawyer, as is her son, Ezra; my daughter, Scott, is a lawyer. My two sons, Bob and Dave, considered the law; but they took other directions, as an investment banker and a construction executive, respectively. My sister, Lee Anne, ever the maverick, started her career as a commercial banker; but, fearful of dying of boredom, she changed gears and became an ICU nurse. Lee Anne’s daughter, Anne Scott, is having a son in March, named Scott; and perhaps he will follow the dominant family profession. (Yes, the names are real: it’s a Southern thing.)
While I would like to reminisce about so many marvelous folks who have positively impacted my professional—and personal--life, I don’t have the time or space for such a tome. I do, however, want to mention a few special people.
As mentioned above, my father was a lawyer; and I have aspired to emulate him, both as an advocate and as a “good person.” He was generous in spirit, and he had a delightful sense of optimism, hilarity, joy, and fun. After every meal with his family, he announced, “That was the best meal I ever had!” No irony in that pronouncement; he actually meant it. My siblings and I often make that pronouncement, with irony and with love.
When he started practicing small-town law, Daddy was sometimes paid in services or produce—sweet potatoes, collard greens, tomatoes. One of my favorite memories of him exemplifies his keen sense of justice. A handyman sought my father's advice because the owner of a sporting goods store in town had sold the bicycle the handyman had brought to him for repair. The handyman needed the bicycle to transport himself to and from work. My father met about this outrage with the store owner, who told Daddy to pound sand—or some such similar sentiment. Daddy bought the handyman a new bicycle (from, obviously, a different store) and arranged to be paid with produce from his client’s garden. And then he told everyone in our family to never enter that sporting goods store, which we never did.
Another, this time amusing, story arose when he later represented a wealthy tobacco farmer, who had allegedly committed tax fraud. The jury removed the “allegedly” and “awarded” the man a short stint in a country-club prison. Upon his release the client threw Daddy a huge Pig Pickin on his tobacco farm in gratitude for Daddy’s getting the man such a short sentence. . . . And so it went.
Ron Yarbrough, who practices surety and construction law in Jackson, Mississippi, was my best and most memorable mentor during my first years of practice. Ron is the epitome of a Southern Gentleman, complete with the proper accent, manners, smarts, and looks (think Atticus Finch/Gregory Peck). He showed me how to weave the facts and the law together to attain the desired result—and he did it mellifluously and successfully and always with a piquant sense of humor. He weaned me off drafting on a legal pad to drafting on a computer: it was not an easy transition for this Luddite. He memorably taught me the meaning of the mule-driving terms “gee” and “haw” during a cross-examination in a lengthy and victorious construction trial.
It was during this time that I married the charming and handsome Stephen Perkins, an luxury hotel and resort architect. To this day, I often remind him that “it’s always a design error!” Many of you have never met Stephen, as he and I agreed early on that a highly responsible adult must remain home with our three intermittently incorrigible children at all times. I attended lawyer and construction conferences, and he attended architect and hotel conferences. My sister, the aforementioned Lee Anne, sometimes stayed with the children; but applying “highly responsible” to her may be stretching the truth just a bit.
It was when we moved to D.C. that I first met Mark McCallum, a young man who was then a lawyer at AGC. I liked him immediately: he was whip smart, strategic, humorous, and well mannered; and he was able to work well with the innovative and irrepressible Bill Ernstrom.
Through the years, Mark’s and my paths have crossed many times: AGC meetings and initiatives, the initial brouhaha over design-build with the attendant parade of horribles, advising on visions and revisions of various standard form construction documents and bonds, green building, P3s, etc. During these years, we had the good fortune to forge trusting and meaningful relationships with folks at many allied trade associations, all of which has inured to the benefit of NASBP and its mission. Later, when Mark became general counsel and then CEO at NASBP, NASBP became a client of mine; and I eventually and happily went in-house as general counsel.
Because I feel so close to so many of you, I think I am comfortable telling you that Mark and I enhanced our various surety relationships during networking time as well as during meeting time. At one large dinner at Tavern on Rush in Chicago, laced with many flutes of Roederer Cristal, one construction industry lobbyist, on a dare, performed her high school baton (okay, it was part of a vacuum cleaner purloined from the restaurant) routine in the middle of Rush Street; while a past president of AGC, dressed in a stunning Captain Hook ensemble, complete with hook, entertained all the restaurant’s guests.
Then there was the time that Mark and I were invited to be inducted into the Sagamore Secret Skinny-Dipping Club. I should explain that the club was not secret at all, nor were we at the Sagamore, although that was where the club was inaugurated. It is crucial that you understand that Mark and I both, with alacrity, declined the invitation and moved away from the shore. However, another past president of AGC and three others, including my less-than-highly-responsible sister, Lee Anne, ran to the shore, dropping their robes while in motion; while Mark and I kept moving away from the shore, gleeful at witnessing the naughty behavior and virtuous that we had the good sense not to participate.
My nearly 12 years at NASBP have been a grand way to close out my professional life, as I have enjoyed using my experiences, relationships, and legal knowledge and skills to support NASBP’s mission. Mark has assembled a crackerjack team at NASBP, and it has been an honor and a privilege to work with Mark and the entire team.
At the beginning of this valediction, I observed that I could not name all those incredible professionals whose relationships I value and treasure so much. But you know who you are; and I cherish the memories of working with (or against) you, learning from you, laughing with you, and sharing our families’ joys and sorrows. I wish you all well professionally and personally.
And now on to new and other life adventures: more golfing; more kayaking; more dog training, showing, and trialing; more writing; more travel (perhaps circumnavigation of Iceland; sailing the inner passage of Alaska; boating on the upper Amazon); and, especially, more time with my beloved family. Because it’s all about relationships--in life as in surety.