Mark Merritt Receives Litigation Section’s Advocate’s Award
The Litigation Section of the North Carolina Bar Association honored Mark Merritt of Robinson Bradshaw in Charlotte on November 30 as the 15th recipient of The Advocate’s Award. The award is presented as merited to attorneys deemed as being “superstars” of the section and the legal profession.
Merritt is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Review and inducted into the Order of the Coif. He has spent most of his career with Robinson Bradshaw, joining the firm in 1983 and serving as a shareholder from 1989-2016. He departed in 2016 and served 28 months as Vice Chancellor and General Counsel for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before resuming his position as a shareholder in the firm in 2019.
His record of volunteer leadership and service is extensive. Merritt is a past president of the North Carolina State Bar and the Mecklenburg County Bar, and a past chair of the NCBA Antitrust & Complex Business Disputes Law Section. He was previously recognized by the NCBA as a recipient of the H. Brent McKnight Renaissance Lawyer Award.
Donald Pocock, chair, presented the award to Merritt, left, during the Litigation Section’s annual CLE program at the N.C. Bar Center.
“The Advocates Award is known as being the highest award that can be bestowed by the Litigation Section,” Pocock said. “The list of past recipients of this award includes people who have been absolute giants in our profession. People who have made differences in civil rights litigation. People who have made differences in the direction of our state and the governance of our state.
“In fact, the criteria for the Advocates Award says that the intent of the award is to recognize ‘superstars of our profession.’ The criteria for the award include showing the highest ethical standards, having great skill as a litigator, demonstrating commitment to service, and so forth. These are very lofty, ambitious standards to me.”
This year’s recipient, Pocock continued, meets and exceeds those standards.
“The people who know him best described Mark Merritt as ‘committed, hard-working, and kind.’ Those three words may not necessarily apply to all members of our bar, but they certainly apply to Mark Merritt. Rob Harrington, who is a partner at Robinson Bradshaw, had this to say about Mark:
“Mark takes great pride in being a lawyer and mentoring young lawyers. His record of commitment to our profession, to our state and to our community shows a dedication that stands on the highest rung of lawyers I have known over my nearly 35 years of practice.”
It is a record, Pocock concluded, truly befitting of a superstar of the legal profession.
“It is a tremendous honor to have your name on the list of the people who have previously received this award,” Merritt began. “I’ve litigated against some of them, known all of them, and I had two of them actually represent me when I had the pleasure of being deposed in lawsuits.
“But there are two I really need to call out: John Wester, known as Buddy, and Ward McKeithen, who are prior recipients of this award. They basically taught me how to practice law.”
Wester and McKeithen were already established senior litigators at Robinson Bradshaw when Merritt joined the firm following a clerkship under Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Their generosity and teaching of young lawyers was really extraordinary,” Merritt said, “but they were also very exacting and held everyone, including themselves, to very high standards. I think that’s really an important part of being a litigator. We owe our clients the highest standards of hard work and competence, and that was really drilled into me at a very young age as a lawyer. I’m really grateful for that.
“When you think back over practicing law for 40 years, you can’t help but think about all the people who were there along the way who were part of your formative experience. I think of judges like Judge Jim McMillan and Judge Robert Potter in the Western District who were incredibly solicitous of young lawyers and really tried to help you become better at your craft. There were people like Judge Marvin Gray and Judge Bill Grist who would take young lawyers under their wing, take them back after court was over and talk to them just about what it means to practice law.
“And I think we’re all the beneficiaries when, as lawyers, we take interest in other lawyers.”
It is also incumbent upon lawyers, Merritt added, to be educators.
“One of the criteria for this award is love of the law, and I do love the law. I particularly love the rule of law and the role it plays in making sure we have a society that provides freedom and justice and fair play. As lawyers, I think we all need to be concerned about the attacks we see on the institutions that protect the rule of law: our courts, our judges, our election process, you name it.
“It seems like these attacks are growing both in terms of their intensity and their frequency. And one of my hopes is that the North Carolina Bar Association, the State Bar, and lawyers in general will take up the mantle of really protecting the role that the rule of law plays in our society and educating people about its importance.”
To emphasize his point, Merritt recalled the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he visited while attending the annual meeting of the Southern Conference of Bar Presidents, which was being held that year in Alexandria, Va. Merritt was serving as president of the State Bar at the time.
“A highlight for us was that Justice Scalia came and greeted us at the beginning of the meeting and spoke informally with lawyers for about 20 minutes,” Merritt said. “The thing he said that has stuck with me is that every country in the world that’s an autocracy probably has a constitution that provides more robust rights than our constitution. And he said the difference between our country and Russia and China is that people here actually believe in the rule of law and the institutions that enforce it. He said if we as lawyers don’t defend those institutions and the role of the rule of law, that’s really the only thing that separates us from autocracy.
“He said this back in 2017, and his point was about attacks that were made on certain judges that he thought were unfair. But his words, now as I reflect on them, almost seem prophetic, and I worry about whether we as lawyers still have the ability to speak truth to power and to protect the rule of law. That’s something in the years that I have left in my practice – and obviously I’m more toward the end of that than I am the beginning – that I really want to focus on.”
Merritt concluded by thanking the North Carolina Bar Association.
“I have been a member of the Bar Association since the first year I started practicing in North Carolina. It’s been meaningful to me to be a member of the sections and to be involved. The CLE has been great and people have given their time, like our presenters today, to help us become better educated in what we do.
“So, to Don and everybody at the North Carolina Bar Association, thank you very much. I am very honored by this award, and it is something that I will always treasure.”
Previous recipients of The Advocate’s Award are:
• Walter Brock (2022)
• John R. Wester (2021)
• Catharine Biggs Arrowood (2020)
• Ted Fillette (2018)
• Janet Ward Black (2017)
• Bill Womble Jr. (2016)
• James E. Ferguson II (2015)
• Ward McKeithen (2013)
• Charles F. Blanchard (2012)
• Alan W. Duncan (2011)
• James T. Williams Jr. (2010)
• H. Grady Barnhill Jr. (2009)
• J. Donald Cowan Jr. (2007)
• Charles L. Becton (2006)
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.