by Cynthia Price
Legal News
Rhoades McKee is 50 years young, and thinking about the future with hope and excitement.
The firm’s 50th anniversary celebration theme “Looking forward. Giving back.” is an indication, though, that they have no intention of abandoning their commitment to the West Michigan community.
A recent celebration featured keynote speaker George Heartwell, Mayor of Grand Rapids, submitting a challenge to Rhoades McKee to join other organizations who care about Grand Rapids to make it an increasingly great place over the next 50 years.
Rhoades McKee is up to that challenge, but at least in part the way the members of the firm intend to go forward is by honoring the past.
A long tradition of involvement with the community — giving of time, funds, and talent —will be continuing with the recent announcement that they will support a wide variety of community projects. While they have been involved with most of these projects over the years (some more recently than others), organizers Ed Goodrich and Bruce Neckers intend to expand and deepen that involvement.
They include: Kids Food Basket, which provides good, nourishing lunches for lower-income schoolchildren; a Law Day donation of the book Arthur Meets the President to the Literacy Center of West Michigan; co-sponsoring the WZZM 13 Food for Families drive, also sponsored by WLHT radio station, Spartan Stores, and ACCESS (a pantry oversight agency); continuing to sponsor the WYCE Hat Trick Concert Series which recognizes twelve area non-profits, and matching contributions to organizations that qualify; continuing to sponsor the Reeds Lake Triathlon in East Grand Rapids; and assisting St. John’s Home (which provides residential care and therapy for abused or neglected children and teens), with work days, drives and funding through Rhoades’ Jeans for a Cause program and other sources.
They will also continue their commitment to the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT), which is an innovative regional training center for youth and adults. Recently, WMCAT entered the photography of some students judged to be at risk of not graduating into the prestigious Scholastic Art Awards student competition, and give of them won Gold Key awards, the highest award given. Rhoades McKee will hold a St. Patrick’s Day Client Event fund-raiser to benefit WMCAT, inviting students to design the invitations. Firm members will also give a lecture series for medical billing students to assist in addressing legal issues. They will also once again sponsor an ArtPrize venue at WMCAT.
All of this builds on the ethic of founder Dale Rhoades, who started the firm part-time when he was working at the City Attorney’s Office. “When I got my law degree I wasn’t intending to go into practice, but I got a job at Michigan Trust and didn’t like it — too staid for me. So the city attorney offered me a job, and he said he’d give me time off to go to court if I needed to as part of my other practice.” That was in 1959.
After a few years, Rhoades realized he liked it a lot and left the city, moving from a small office on Division to the Waters Building and joining with William Garlington to form Rhoades and Garlington. When Bill McKee and Roger Boer joined the firm in 1964, the name remained Rhoades, McKee, and Boer until a 1987 merger with Goodrich Titta added both of their names to the list. In 2004, the shortened name Rhoades McKee PC was adopted.
Rhoades remembers fondly a case from his initial part-time stint where he really feels he made a difference. The brother and mother of a young woman with five children came in one night and said the woman had been snatched out of her home by officials and taken away to jail, with pending incarceration at the Kalamazoo State Hospital for the mentally ill. On investigating, Rhoades found out that her charge was based on certificates that she was “dangerous” signed by two psychiatrists and upon his challenge, the judge released the woman — into his custody!
Further investigation showed that there was a common practice of having pre-signed certificates attesting to the mental illness of women in divorce cases at the probate court. Rhoades was appalled. He says, “I was a young whippersnapper; I’d been in the military but I was fresh out of school and I didn’t know much – but I knew that was wrong.” So he went into battle with the system, sending his young client into an interview with the psychiatrists wearing a hidden tape recorder. Rhoades asked for a jury trial, which was unprecedented in that type of case. When the tape was played back to the jury, it was apparent the doctors were perjuring themselves.
The young woman was exonerated and went back to her children, and the practice of pre-signed certificates changed. Years later, the woman’s brother reintroduced himself and said that she had worked hard as a cleaning woman to support and raise her five children, and all five of them had gone on to fulfilling lives and careers.
Dale Rhoades is now retired and living in Florida, but he is proudest of cases like that and his work on eminent domain, in which he eventually specialized. He was instrumental in facilitating many of the deals that allowed downtown Grand Rapids to flourish. For example, one of his clients was located on the current site of the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and Rhoades’ progressive thinking made that land exchange happen.
Rhoades was also something of a maverick, as a person who has no patience with waste of either time or money. At one point he adopted the policy of telling his clients not to answer irrelevant questions during deposition, a practice he deplores. For example, once an opposing attorney asked one of his clients who his fifth grade teacher was, where she lived and what she was doing now. Rhoades pulled the plug on that deposition immediately.
The 1987 merger with Goodrich Titta resulted in several highly-qualified lawyers entering the firm, including Ed Goodrich and Bruce Neckers. It also doubled the number of attorneys and set off an expansion mode which was in keeping with the trends to larger law firms in those years. Rhoades McKee now employs over 100 people, 52 of them attorneys.
And what else has changed over the last 50 years?
Rhoades, Goodrich and Neckers said the most drastic changes, both good and bad, have come due to technology. Rhoades remembers in the early days having to come in on a Sunday to prepare 30 sets of “wet copies” through a mimeograph-type duplicator prior to a Monday hearing, before there were photocopiers.
Acceleration of the pace of court and other cases is another outcome of increased technology, as well as concerns about privacy based on electronic communication.
Dale Rhoades also says he has seen an incredible increase in regulation and in the situations covered by the law. The explosion in the number of lawyers (Goodrich says there were 300 in Grand Rapids when he started practice, and there are now over 1800 just in the Grand Rapids Bar, where membership is voluntary) has only kept pace with the number of cases.
At the firm, however, there is plenty of continuity. Mary Jane Rhoades, Dale’s daughter who goes by MJ, says she feels the firm can feel really good about the fact that their first client, Dekker Book Binding, is still with them.
MJ Rhoades continues, “I’m proud of the fact that an organization my father had a significant hand in is around and thriving after 50 years – I think it’s a tribute to him and his hard work and the work of a lot of other people,” including Goodrich, Neckers and firm President Robert Shaver.
Shaver adds that the firm is committed to keeping up with the changing times. With recent internal organization of both a medical science and a climate change, environment and sustainability practice group (see Grand Rapids Legal News 8/12/09), as well as hiring a bilingual lawyer to serve Spanish-speaking clients, the firm is ahead of the curve of the future and ready for the next 50 years.
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