Courier-Tribune Reprints
These stories are reprinted with permission from The Courier-Tribune, Asheboro, N.C. Stories are listed in date order, with the most recent first.
February 21, 20119:54 a.m.ASHEBORO — Judge Lillian B. Jordan said she does not know why she was given the prestigious Chief Justice’s Professionalism Award for 2011.
“I don’t think I fit the category when you look at the people that have gotten it,” Jordan said in a recent interview.
According to the N.C. court system website (www.nccourts.org), the award, presented last month for the 13th year, is presented annually to an individual or organization “whose contributions have demonstrated the highest commitment to genuine professionalism and the highest standard of legal ethics.”
Jordan said she was shocked and a little nervous after being notified that she had won the honor. The notion crossed her mind that the notification might be a mistake. But, of course, it was not.
A partial list of her accomplishments bear witness to the fact that Jordan has contributed handily to her community and her state, both in and out of the courtroom, for a long time.
She has been president of the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys, the Randolph County Bar Association, the 19B District Bar, and Legal Services of North Carolina. She has served on the board of directors for the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys, Central Carolina Legal Services, Legal Services of North Carolina, and the North Carolina Justice Center. She has served on the North Carolina Courts Commission, the Revenue Laws Study Committee of the state legislature, and the ABA Family Law Section.
Twice, the Asheboro Jaycettes named her Jaycette of the Year. She has been honored with the Guilford College Alumni Excellence Award, the Athena Award from the Asheboro/Randolph Chamber of Commerce, as a Paul Harris Fellow by the Asheboro Rotary Club, and has been Democratic Woman of the Year in Randolph County. She serves on the Randolph Community College board of trustees.
When Jordan stepped to the front of the room in Raleigh last month to receive her latest award from Chief Justice Sarah Parker — during a joint dinner of the North Carolina State Bar and the North Carolina Bar Association — she was a long way from the summer day in 1975 when she struggled to tell her attorney husband, Tom O’Briant, that she wanted to go to law school.
She was a stay-at-home mother with four sons, but the youngest would soon be starting school. She tended to hearth and home, did volunteer work and had plenty of free time to play tennis and bridge. But she wanted to do something more.
She did not want to return to teaching, something she had done in the early years of her marriage. She explored the idea of becoming a paralegal, but after finding out that that would require two years of school, she figured she could just go one more year and become a full-fledged lawyer.
“A couple of years before, it would never have occured to me that I could go to law school and make it,” she said. “I never thought I was smart enough to go to law school.”
When she graduated from Asheboro High School in 1957, females who wanted a professional career of some kind, she said, were pointed in one of three directions. They could be nurses, secretaries, or schoolteachers. She went to Guilford College (that’s where she met her future husband) and earned a degree in history so she could teach.
What helped change her thinking was that Jordan had become involved in the women’s movement of the 1970s and working toward passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was one of several women who went to county commissioners and asked them to commission a study on the status of women in Randolph County. To the surprise of the women, the commissioners said OK — and appointed her to chair a local committee to do the work.
In the final analysis, Jordan said, they assembled a book with lots of facts and figures and presented it to commissioners, along with a list of recommendations. One of the ideas, which came to pass, was the establishment of a shelter for battered women in Randolph County.
Despite her enlightenment — and the fact that she and Tom had shared household chores from the beginning of their marriage — it took her weeks to work up the nerve to have the conversation about law school with her husband. She dropped the bombshell one day during lunch. She had not been talking long when Tom chimed in.
“I think that’s a great idea,” he said.
So, in the fall of 1976, she started three years of early-morning commutes to the Wake Forest University School of Law in Winston-Salem. By the time the boys got home from school, she was back home, too, studying. She graduated in 1979.
Her husband specialized in real estate law. Eventually, she zeroed in on family law as her area of expertise.
“We learned pretty quickly that we could practice together and be married,” she said, smiling, “as long as we didn’t do the same things.”
Many years later, Tom urged her to seek legal certification as a specialist in family law from the North Carolina State Bar. She was reluctant because the notion of preparing for an exam reminded her too much of the intense preparation that had been required to pass the state bar exam.
Then Tom got sick. He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, in late 1994. She decided to pursue the specialty designation for him. He died the following May, before she took the exam — and earned board certification — in the fall.
She practiced law two more years. As time passed, going to the office she had shared with Tom got harder instead of easier. She had never given serious thought to becoming a judge, though some had suggested that she would be a good judge.
She was ready for a change in February 1997 when the state legislature approved an additional district court judge in Judicial District 19B, which includes Randolph, and when Gov. Jim Hunt appointed her to a two-year term in that seat.
As a Democrat, she knew the likelihood of being re-elected to a full term in the Republican stronghold of Randolph was slim, so the move would be time-limited. Or so she thought. She wound up being reappointed to another term. By the time she ran for election — and lost — she had been tapped as an emergency district court judge. (She also got married again — to Tom Jordan — in 1999.)
Since 2002, she has filled in in courtrooms around the state for judges who are on vacation or sick, or when local judges recuse themselves from a case and an “outsider” is needed to hear it, or simply when caseloads require extra help. (She also serves as a mediator or an arbitrator in legal disputes.)
During the economic downturn, the state has spent less money on emergency judges though. Last year Jordan said she was assigned to about a third of the work she had two years earlier.
Now, she and some other emergency judges in the state sometimes work for nothing. As one example, Jordan presided over a week of family court in Randolph County last year, volunteering after hearing that the session might be cancelled because there was no judge available.
“If you’re my age and you’re healthy, which I happen to be, I don’t mind doing it at all.”
But she’s not volunteering her time and legal expertise simply to help the state. She’s doing it for the people.
“I don’t do that to help the state, or the lawyers,” she said. “It’s terrible to not get your case heard.”
Jordan said she was never nervous as a lawyer. Thanks to her husband, she knew all the local attorneys and judges the first time she ever stepped into a courtroom. She also was not a wide-eyed twentysomething; she turned 40 the same weekend she graduated from law school. And she had had experience, of a sort, in the classroom.
“Teachers are actors,” she said. “You are performing all day long in front of 35-40 kids.”
She was not apprehensive when she took the gavel either.
“When you are a trial lawyer,” she said, “and you’re in it and you are advocating for your client as best you can, that’s stressful. To me, it’s easier to make those decisions (as a judge) based on the evidence or law you know.”
Jordan said she is honored by the recent award and satisfied with the career path she took in life. But, she said, legal contributions do not top the list of her life’s greatest work.
“I don’t have any regrets about going to law school or going on the bench,” she said, “but I would say that the biggest satisfaction and what I consider my greatest accomplishment would be my four sons.”
Spoken like a truly liberated woman.
Reprinted with permission from The Courier-Tribune
February 17, 201110:28 p.m.
SEAGROVE — The small businesses of Seagrove are facing big challenges.
Representatives from Randolph Community College’s (RCC) Small Business Center and the Randolph County Economic Development Corporation (EDC), were on hand Thursday night in Seagrove for an information session to educate the community about changing their challenges to goals and to put their businesses “on the map”.
“Our goal tonight is to ‘map’ Seagrove businesses to see what type of education and services are needed to help them rise to the next level of success,” said RCC Small Business Center Director Lonnie Hamm. “We’ll even bring the classes here, to Seagrove, to ensure the success of all the businesses who want to participate.”
The idea was the brainchild of Mayor Allen Hale who asked RCC to work with the local community in developing educational programming — not only to the potters — but, the other small businesses as well.
“My main goal is to get the community the education it needs so that the small businesses will grow even more,” Mayor Hale said. “And, then each and everyone here could be even more successful and bring in even more customers.”
For years, Seagrove has been known for its pottery, and still is. But, at the meeting other small businesses were also represented.
Landscaping, hardware and catering were among small businesses with representatives attending the meeting.
Brothers Bradley and Travis Walker who own Walker Landscape Creations have been doing well on their own so far. At the January Seagrove town meeting, commissioners awarded Walker Landscape Creations the bid for park maintenance.
“We’ve been trying to expand our business — like maybe with a garden center — so we thought this would give us some good information,” Bradley Walker said. “We will definitely be checking into these classes.”
While the RCC Small Business Center offers a slew of classes, Thursday’s session was to get feedback on what other classes could be added that would be effective for the town of Seagrove.
With Independent Public Relations Consultant Greta Lint facilitating, the group was taken through a range of class ideas feeding off what concerned each small business owner and ideas of their own.
Marketing and promoting seemed to be the biggest issue right away. Ideas started spinning around the room and classes were created.
These new class ideas include:
How to handle money
How to deal with health insurance and paying medical bills
Business insurance
Website promotion and search engine optimization
Social media to improve your business
Quick Book
Grant writing
Hamm said he was excited about the new classes and hopes to have them started within weeks.
Another small business owner, Anita Morgan who owns Anita’s Pottery & Dogwood Gallery in Seagrove, said she hopes taking some of these classes will perk her business right up.
“It’s been tough, the pottery business isn’t what it used to be, but I haven’t given up,” said Morgan, who has a business degree from Montgomery Community College. “This is my chance — these classes are a chance for all of us — to put our business on the map.”
Reprinted with permission from The Courier-Tribune
