The Tiny Moments
There have been a few times over the course of my career when I’ve thought long and hard about why I became a lawyer. My practice is probably like yours in that it keeps me so busy I’m usually moving from one task to the next, with little if any time to step back and reflect on the bigger picture of my life’s work. But my wife, Angie, has a unique ability to help me slow down and put things into perspective. She is often a better observer of what I’m experiencing, and she sees what I internalize: all the stress and anxiety that comes with being a trial lawyer.
Twice she’s asked me a simple question which prompted some long-overdue self-reflection: Why are you doing this to yourself?
The first time Angie asked me that question I didn’t have a good answer. I was 35 years old and after 10 years of practice I was just coming to terms with the realization that the reward for long hours of hard work was more long hours of hard work. If you know me or know my story, you know what I did next: I left my law practice and started a new career as a journalist.
But I came back. Twelve years after I left North Carolina I came back and started practicing law again. I had accumulated a lifetime of adventure and experience as a producer at “60 Minutes,” but as I stepped back into the courtroom, I quickly found all the stress and anxiety that comes with everything we do came rushing back.
Angie saw that every time I prepared for a trial. Just like when I was in law school and I would go to the undergrad library to study for exams far away from other law students, I prepare for trials at home, away from the office and other work distractions. So she was there for the late nights, early mornings, and lost weekends to trial preparation. She could also see the toll that took on me, both mentally and physically.
Given how I responded the last time she asked this question, I imagine it was not without trepidation that she asked me again: Why are you doing this to yourself? But now with a bit of age and experience, I knew why: Beyond helping ordinary people in extraordinary need, it was the tiny moments that kept me going – those brief interactions which over time give our lives meaning and purpose.
I discovered this by accident.
I’m a pacer. When I prepare for a trial I walk back-and-forth across my home office, playing out direct and cross examinations, opening statements and closing arguments – any of the dozens of paths a trial can take after it starts. And I talk when I walk. The process works best when I’m on my feet and speaking out loud, just like I’m in the courtroom. I take myself there mentally, picturing not the desk and bookshelf in my office, but the jury who will decide my client’s fate.
Coleman Cowan with his son, Julian, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year.
My 11-year-old son, Julian, has figured this out. His curiosity about who his dad was talking to late into the night initially drew him upstairs. He started sitting outside my closed office door as I paced and practiced, speaking to an empty room in what he calls my “courtroom voice.” This is usually after his bedtime, and because he knows he is supposed to be asleep, he sits quietly outside my office so no one knows he is there.
I never knew he was there until he started asking me questions about my cases and the trials I was preparing for. After a couple of all-too-specific questions, I figured out what he was doing. Julian’s curiosity prompted long discussions about what I do and why I do it.
When I was his age, I didn’t really understand what my dad did as a lawyer. A lawyer was someone who wore a suit and worked in an office. But to me, being a lawyer apparently meant being there for all of my soccer games, cheering me on from the sidelines. It also meant being my mentor, guide, and a hallmark of what is right and what is wrong.
As my conversations with Julian about my cases and what I do as a lawyer continued, I remembered all those tiny moments with my dad and how they still affected me decades later. I hoped that I was becoming a good “lawyer” too, with everything that meant to me when I was my son’s age.
It’s been more than a year since I discovered that Julian sat outside my office and listened to me prepare for trial, but it’s become the image in my head every time I’ve spoken to a jury since then. It reminds me how important Julian and Angie are to me, just as my dad was before he died.
At some point in my life, I realized I had become much like my father: My dad loved being a trial lawyer. So I became a trial lawyer. He was on the Law Review at Wake Forest. So I worked hard to get on the Law Review. My dad ran marathons. So I started running marathons. But the reality that I had become my dad was not the dreaded transformation I had long feared. It was a good thing, and meant I was doing things the right way.
Coleman Cowan with his father, Don, at the Wake Forest Law School graduation in 1995.
Soon after I graduated from law school, I was trying one of my first cases, at the Wake County Courthouse. It was a small personal injury case, but I had prepared for it like it was the Pentagon Papers Trial, with the weight of the legal world resting on the outcome. There wasn’t one piece of evidence, or any contingency I had not mapped out in detail – another lesson from my dad. As I stood up to begin my closing argument, I noticed someone slip into the back of the courtroom. It was my dad. He was still there, just as he had always been throughout my life. Silently cheering me on.
That presence has become more important to me as I’ve gotten older and started my own family. No matter what is going on at work, in the office, or in the courtroom, I’m always seeking to be present for my son, just as my dad was to me.
In many ways, Julian is years ahead of where I was at his age. He’s all of 11 years old, but we’re already having conversations about my work which I never had with my dad until I was much older. Now when I stand up in front of a jury, I picture Julian sitting outside my door, listening to the words I am now speaking to the jury. Sometimes it’s just him I see. Sometimes my dad is there too.
If you see me glance at the back of the courtroom as I address a jury, you’ll know who I’m looking for and why. It’s a tiny moment. But it means everything.
Coleman Cowan of Durham is a shareholder in the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin. An Emmy Award-winning producer for “60 Minutes,” he is a member of the NCBA Professional Vitality Committee whose contributions appear on the committee’s website page and NCBarBlog component. A member of the NCBA Litigation Section, Cowan is a graduate of Wake Forest University School of Law (1995, J.D.), Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (2007, M.S.), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1992, B.A.)