Law: The Fastest Gun in the West

Cowboy Attorney Gerry Spence mows down corporate giants

He failed his first bar exam. When he walks into the courtroom, he sports snakeskin cowboy boots, a knee-length beaver coat and a ten-gallon Stetson. His outside interests have included selling bull semen. During one trial, he kept an intriguing box on the table in front of him. The contents: the embalmed leg his plaintiff had lost in the accident at issue. He won some $300,000 in damages.

Gerry Spence, 52, of Jackson, Wyo., is part cowboy, part actor and all lawyer. Says one of Spence’s victims: “He’s so good that he shouldn’t be permitted in a courtroom.” He has not lost a case before a jury in twelve years, even though he regularly takes on the polished lawyers who represent powerful corporations. The multimillion-dollar losers include the Kerr-McGee energy conglomerate, for allowing Employee Karen Silkwood to be contaminated with plutonium; Squibb, for marketing an inadequately tested pregnancy-detection drug (Gestest) that apparently caused birth defects; and, most recently, Penthouse magazine, for a 1979 article that libeled a former Miss Wyoming, Kimerli Pring. The jury awarded her $26.5 million last month, a record if it survives court challenges by the magazine. Next month in Salt Lake City, Spence shoots for his biggest haul yet—$110 million—when he squares off against Utah officials on behalf of the widow and children of a man shot by Utah police.

The primary factor in Spence’s prodigious success rate appears to be his way with juries. A commanding 6 ft. 2 in. and 225 lbs., he is in constant motion in the courtroom, sometimes edging up to the jury railing to make a point in the deep, reassuring baritone that almost led him into a singing career, or to confess disarmingly: “I’m a little anxious about whether I can represent my client—I just wanted to share that with you.” Says a former partner, Robert Rose, now chief justice of Wyoming’s supreme court: “He comes off as so real that jurors trust him. They have to decide which side to be on, and if he wants to be your friend, you can barely resist him.” Spence likes to illustrate his arguments with graphic props, such as an old milking stool whose legs he removes, one by one, to show how his opponent’s case collapses without certain supports. He also favors folksy sayings like “You’ve got to get the hogs out of the spring if you want to get the water cleared up.”

In the Penthouse trial, Spence used a typical strategy: portraying his client as a simple, small victim of big malign forces. To the six Cheyenne jurors, he characterized Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, 50, as an arrogant, unprincipled New Yorker, “the gentleman sitting over there in the velvet pants.” When Guccione suggested that only people with the intelligence of a “flatworm” would think the disputed article was nonfiction, Spence, a University of Wyoming law graduate, began to refer to himself and fellow state residents as mere flatworms. He also listed 15 similarities between Pring and the protagonist of the article, which described how a baton-twirling Miss Wyoming used her sexual prowess to try to win the Miss America Pageant.

Another key to Spence’s success is exhaustive preparation. In readying the Penthouse case, he and the staff (two investigators, six aides) at his six-lawyer firm amassed 25 boxes of evidence, including transcripts of interviews with some of the 111 witnesses questioned. For ten days before the trial began, Spence closeted himself in his office and in his new 21-room home at the base of the Teton Mountains and studied every detail. He called in his wife Imaging, 39, and two of their six children to screen “home movies”—videotaped interviews with witnesses—in search of inconsistencies. He also prepares physically by running 15 miles a week and shunning alcohol and tobacco. The cost of all this is reflected in Spence’s fees: usually 50% of a winning judgment, rather than the standard 33%. His hefty annual income, he says, is confidential.

Spence’s golden years came only after a shattering midlife crisis. In 1968 his 20-year first marriage was failing. He had become a heavy drinker. His effort to be appointed a judge had failed. He closed down his firm, sold all his property and headed for California. When he returned soon thereafter he lost three straight cases —and what was left of his self-confidence.

Spence credits three things for reversing his tailspin. One was his 1969 marriage to Imaging (a name Spence gave her after it came to him in a dream). Another was a change of mission: he rid himself of insurance company clients and began representing underdogs. The third was some sensitivity training that he claims enables him to be open and genuine in front of juries. “You can’t fool twelve people very long,” he says. “That’s the beauty of our system.”

His detractors see his courtroom behavior in a different light. “He pushes people to the wall; he creates his own rules,” charges one critic. Even admirers concede that Spence is aggressive. Sometimes, says Wyoming Governor Ed Herschler, “he has one foot in the jury box.” Replies Spence: “A lawyer who fails to work right on the edge and leave no margin is failing his client.” In the little free time Spence allows himself, he likes to write poems and photograph flowers and birds.

In his next big case, Spence will be trying to prove that state and county police shot Polygamist John Singer, an excommunicated Mormon, in the back without justification in the climax of a dispute over whether he could educate his children at home. Viewed in advance, it looks to Spence the way all his cases look: “Absolutely frightening.” To hear him tell it, he approaches the trial arena in a state of high tension and fear that he may lose. “All the basic feelings of combat and death are there,” he says. And now that many consider him the best in the West —perhaps even in the nation—his anxiety only increased: “Every young gunfighter wants me.” —By Bennett H. Beach.

Reported by Richard Woodbury/Cheyenne