Sonny Marks (’07), left, with mentor and friend, John Bradford (’74).
I remember the Bankers Box with the dent in it, outside my law firm office. I could see it from my desk. The dent came from the shoe of John Bradford (’74), who kicked the cardboard box in anger at a strategic error I made in written discovery, early in my law practice. Bradford was a partner at the Lake Charles firm, near the top of the letterhead, and he brought me in to a case that went to jury trial.
We were not formally put together as such, but Bradford became a mentor to me. I learned from him, usually by way of direct order.
“Don’t tell me what’s wrong with my case. Tell me how I can win.”
“Highlight in yellow – that way it doesn’t show up on the photocopy.”
“Carry a briefcase to a meeting, even if you don’t have enough to carry in there.”
“Don’t blame the staff. You’re the lawyer and it’s your responsibility.”
“Don’t just lay something on my desk or on my chair for me to review – come to me and tell me about it.”
“Don’t come to me with a problem without bringing an idea of how to solve it.”
I’m close to six feet tall, and Bradford is shorter than me and does not have a large build. Yet he was terrifying in the manner that he’d get in my face. By the time I started law school at LSU in 2004, I didn’t experience a harsh Socratic method like some of my predecessors had. What I missed there I gained under Bradford. He quizzed me on how to win cases, occasionally over coffee with fellow members of the firm.
The law firm was on the fourth and fifth floors of a downtown building. Bradford chose to walk the stairs rather than take the elevator. I followed his lead.
I started law school at age 36, after a career as a newspaper reporter. Bradford told me over coffee one day that I had a short runway. He asked me why I wasn’t practicing with my father, who was near the end of a long career with his Baton Rouge firm.
He told me gorillas beat their chests to scare one another. They don’t kill each other, lest they tear down their troop.
He taught me why coaches yell at refs—not to overturn the last call but to get the next one.
On the way back from an out-of-town deposition, we spoke about selling. I told him I didn’t think I could work in sales. He told me that if I didn’t think that my law career was about sales, whether it be selling to the judge, the jury, the client, to fellow members of the firm, then I needed to think again.
I caught a break when Bradford went on vacation, which wasn’t often. He came back and said matter-of-factly that with the amount of work waiting for him upon his return, it wasn’t worth leaving.
I brought my draft briefs and motions for him to review, and he repeatedly told me I didn’t have enough in the first sentence to catch the judge’s attention. He taught me to read my work aloud to myself when I proofread, that the ear catches things that the eye doesn’t.
I learned more about practicing law from him than anyone, including my dad. Many days I feared and loathed Bradford. I didn’t measure up, and the growing pains were grueling. Then I left, after six years, to take a different job.
As time went by, I felt gratitude for how much he gave me. In my new job as in-house counsel, I realized that John Bradford shaped my legal instincts.
Eleven years after I left his firm, I sought him out to learn more of his story. We both grew up in Baton Rouge, and we both moved two hours west to Lake Charles to spend our adult lives. We went to the same high school in Baton Rouge, Catholic High. John was small as a boy, “sickly” as he described it, “and I didn’t necessarily hold my tongue.” He sometimes went to the chapel at recess to avoid getting picked on or embarrassed.
He went to LSU for undergrad and planned to go to med school. He focused on football games and on partying with his fraternity brothers. His Comparative Anatomy professor gave tests on Saturday mornings to see who was serious.
“That meant you had to sacrifice your Friday nights, and I was too stupid to do that,” John said.
He got drafted into the Army, where he served as a medical supply officer. On his way to Vietnam, he had a layover in San Francisco. He and a lieutenant went for a beer and missed their flight. The Army changed John’s assignment from a hospital to a mechanized infantry group. He and the same lieutenant lived in a hole in the ground for 10 months in the demilitarized zone (DMZ). “And then I became a little bit more serious about what I was doing,” John said.
He traded medicine and denatured alcohol for cement to fortify the roof of their bunker, to protect against bunker-busting rockets. Another time, he saw two Vietnamese “on my side of the road and they were sawing on a tree,” John said. “We’d had some skirmishes, and I had my gun locked and loaded.”
The Americans had the OK to shoot, but John paused. “Did I want to shoot them or not,” he reflected. He chose not to. “I think it was God who guided me.
“When you have a gun, you feel really big, and the adrenaline is flowing,” he said. “It wasn’t the right thing to do. They weren’t threatening me, they weren’t in combat uniform. They were just trying to make a life.”
He spent two years in the Army, then followed a friend into law school. Professor J. Denson Smith, “Big Red,” asked John about a case. “I said it was this way. He said, ‘Maybe you look at it this other way.’ I said, ‘No, you got it wrong.’”
A Torts professor from New York taught common law. “It was about three or four weeks into the class and I said to myself, he’s not teaching me what I’m going to need to practice law in Louisiana, a civil law state. So, I went and had a conversation with him and told him I didn’t need that. Our class didn’t need it. And I got my worst grade in law school.” So much for anonymous grading, Bradford said. It was a lesson in not showing up the judge.
John met and married his wife Dinah during law school, and they moved to Lake Charles, where he got a job. There, he wrote briefs for his mentor to review.
“He would tear it up,” John said. “So I said to myself, I’m not going to try to make it perfect. I’m just going to give him my first draft, let him tear it up and then I’ll work on it. Obviously, I see things different than you, so tell me what you want.”
When John grew up, his father was in management at one of the chemical plants in Baton Rouge. He didn’t like union lawyers because they were involved in strikes. Some of John’s earliest work at the law firm was representing Jupiter Chemical Company in labor relations, at a time when Jupiter wanted to hire a non-union contractor from out of town. John heard there was going to be trouble at the plant, and he went to his mentor about heading out there.
“Son, you’re a lawyer. You’re no longer in the military,” his mentor told him. “Your job is to fight in the courthouse.”
A gate was smashed at Jupiter, a trailer got shot up, and someone died in the violence. The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) came about because of it and so did the passage of right to work laws in this state.
John estimates he has tried more than 100 jury trials in his 50 years practicing law, and that he has won more than he lost. He remembers those he lost. He caught himself occasionally embellishing the opposing witness’s testimony. John saw it as he wanted to see it, through “rose-colored glasses,” he said. He learned that, when impeaching, to use the same words the witness used in his deposition.
He didn’t keep up with his timesheets, which annoyed his partners. It made sense to me that John would be so focused on his case that he’d lose sight of billing for it.
Before trials, he prayed. “Help me do the best. Let me be the best lawyer I can be,” he prayed, “and everything else, I’ll trust in You.” Now, near the end of his law career, John believes that God answered his prayers.
“He allowed me to do my best. He allowed me to focus on listening.”
Outside of his practice, he plays golf and grows daylilies. One day in 2023 during his semi-retirement, he was driving a cart at a local course, and a ball from another fairway hit one of his fingers on the steering wheel. The resulting injury put him off the golf course and out of his garden for a while. During that time, he picked up a Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana prospectus that he’d set aside. He learned about the health insurer’s plans to sell to Elevance Health.
John didn’t like what he read; he didn’t think it was a good deal for him, his family and for the rest of the policyholders. He called state legislators, he spoke with Blue Cross’s CEO, he kept asking questions. John met a fellow attorney, also near the end of his career, and together they pushed for a public hearing in the Louisiana Senate.
“I was dealing with the biggest, most powerful company in Louisiana with an army of lawyers and lobbyists, and which had the governor on its side, and we were able to get the deal defeated,” John said. Blue Cross announced in February that it was not going through with its sale to Elevance. John said this was his most satisfying legal win in his career because he had helped 1.8 million citizens of Louisiana keep their health insurance, and he did not charge them a fee.
I shut off my recorder and left his home after a couple hours. On our way out, he told me I shouldn’t have left the law firm, but that he understood why I did. He told me that he saw I had the potential to be a good lawyer and that is why he spent time with me, to push me to be the best I could be. He told me if he did not believe that I had the potential, that we would just go out and have a beer and talk football. John said he learned things from all his associates, and he told me what he learned from me.
Sonny Marks (’07) can be reached at sonnymarks320@gmail.com.
