In a legal world filled with aggressively ambitious personalities, Attorney John “Jack” Martzell has excelled at the top of his profession with an opposite laid-back approach. Over his five-decade career, he has never formulated plans or developed objectives for his practice, and he speaks in a surprisingly passive tone about all the fascinating and high-profile cases that have simply “walked through my door.”
“I remember riding a trolley when I was a high school sophomore filled with plans and mulling over how none of them ever seemed to work out,” he recalls. “I made a deal with God and said I would just provide the forward momentum for my life, and You do the rest. It’s worked out wonderfully, and I’m not disappointed as often.”
As Martzell approaches 70, he doesn’t seem to be mired in nostalgia about his long career or to be thinking much about retirement. He simply keeps on with his daily work out of the restored 1840 building that houses the firm of Martzell and Bickford in New Orleans’ Warehouse District. His beautiful office contains its original cypress beams and floors and is decorated with lush drapes, an impressive antique statue of an Arab woman, and long-handled feathered fans one could imagine servants wielding in a sultan’s chamber. The unifying theme is “Napoleon in Egypt,” Napoleon being one of Martzell’s most admired historical figures. The lawyer points to the Corsican’s military accomplishments, infrastructural improvements of Paris, drafting of the civil code, and towering persona in general.
Even if Martzell doesn’t have the grand ambition of a Napoleon, one shouldn’t discount the “forward momentum” that he provides to his career. He was recently awarded the Curtis R. Boisfontaine Trial Advocacy Award, the highest honor of the Louisiana State Bar Association. The media have previously profiled Martzell as a “lawyer’s lawyer,” noting his eloquence, curiosity, and legal craftsmanship. While he may not aggressively seek out business, it’s his reputation for excellence that has brought many clients through his door, from boxer Muhammad Ali to Al Copeland, the flashy Popeye’s Fried Chicken magnate. Martzell was recently involved in a well-watched class action suit against Murphy Oil regarding a Hurricane Katrina oil spill. He’s done quite a bit of white collar defense work and maritime personal injury litigation. It can be difficult to connect the dots. Martzell describes his practice as “wonderfully eclectic” and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Much of Martzell’s life and career has been shaped by his Catholic boyhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, his time as an undergraduate and law student at Notre Dame in Indiana, and his early years as a clerk and young lawyer in New Orleans. He recalls dates and long-past events with clarity, even remembering a fit of hysterical tears at the age of five when Notre Dame lost a key football game.
His father never actively encouraged Martzell to go to his alma mater of Notre Dame, but admiration pushed the younger man to follow in the elder’s footsteps. At the time, collegiate debate teams were popular, and Martzell excelled at a national level. Despite the close link between debating and lawyering, Martzell was inclined to go into business; he was accepted his senior year by Harvard Business School. An offer of a debate fellowship to Notre Dame’s law school combined with the happy life he was enjoying in Indiana conspired to make him to change direction—another instance of Martzell’s strategic refusal to stick to preconceived plans.
“After three months of law school, I said to myself ‘This is it?’” says Martzell. “I loved it. It has never seemed like work to me.”
In 1961, Martzell began a clerkship in New Orleans with Judge J. Skelly Wright who was a lightning rod at the time for his involvement in the enforcement of desegregation laws. Wright was harassed by white society so relentlessly that in 1962 he accepted an appointment to the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, DC, but not without having left a lasting influence on New Orleans… and Martzell.
Martzell’s experience in the times’ tumultuous racial politics dropped in his lap a job to represent the City of Bogalusa, about 70 miles north of New Orleans. Bogalusa, a lumber mill town with a powerful union, had a restive African-American population agitating for employment rights and non-discriminatory practices.
“I was defending the establishment, and our goal was to deal with the situation,” he recalls. “When I was a clerk, I was disappointed with the establishment lawyers, who treated racial issues like a crusade. I worked on the issues like a lawyer.”
Once the Bogalusa unrest had begun moving toward resolution, Louisiana Governor John McKeithen tapped Martzell, still in his 20s, to be the director of the newly formed Human Relations Commission (HRC) along with a black associate director. The commission, purportedly the first of its kind, consisted of 42 whites and 42 blacks, and its goal was to work through state racial tensions in those “incredible times.”
“We changed many city ordinances to make them non-discriminatory, but we failed a lot, too,” explains Martzell. “There was no precedent for anything I was doing during those years, and lawyers love precedents. It’s scary at first to venture out beyond them; then, it’s thrilling and you can’t get enough–it’s like catnip. If there were ever a book about me, it would be called A Lawyer in No-Precedent Land.”
During his six years as director of the HRC, Martzell was also building his law practice in New Orleans, and his reputation for skill with the law was becoming well known. Along with Governor McKeithen whose term ended in 1972, he knew (and still knows) many political players in Louisiana. For a time, there was a buzz around Martzell entering the political arena. While he’s been a confidant of politicians and has participated behind the scenes, he’s never ventured into the limelight himself. He likes the law, but the posturing required to be successful at the political game doesn’t appeal to him.
Still, his exposure to political circles has led politicians in trouble to come into his office. Currently, he’s working on the defense of C. Hunter King, a former elected judge of Orleans Parish who was ousted for violating campaign finance laws and for perjury during a related investigation. In the early 1990s, Martzell was involved in defense work in the casino license controversy that eventually led to imprisonment of former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Specifically, Martzell had Edwards’ brother and Edward DeBartolo, the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, as clients.
His firm also became the only one in Louisiana to try election contests in both the US Senate and House of Representatives after representing Senator Mary Landrieu and Representative Rick Tonry in separate cases. “Those were interesting experiences,” he says, “different than trying a case in a judicial setting,” and adds that his firm won both contests.
While politicians have pretty high profiles, no client has compared to the fame of three-time heavyweight boxing champion and undisputable American icon, Muhammad Ali. The case found Martzell in 1978 after Ali won a bout against Leon Spinks in the Superdome. Two boxing promoters filed a $20 million suit against Ali alleging that comments he made during a post-match press conference were slanderous.
“Ali is larger than life, but he’s also one of the nicest, most pleasant, most giving people I’ve ever met,” Martzell says. “A normally 10 minute walk to the courthouse would take 45 minutes with him, because he’d stop to talk with everyone he encountered, joke around and spar with them.”
“He had an enormous sense of his fame and importance to his fans. He told me, ‘I represent a lot to the black and poor. We can’t settle the case because it would be a backwards step.’ So, we went to trial, and we won.”
Along the way, Martzell also developed a friendship with Ali. He and his young son were invited to Las Vegas as Ali trained for an upcoming match. They spent four days visiting in his hotel suite, which had been transformed into a gym, in the presence of a fascinating entourage of characters all buzzing around this outsized personality. Martzell likens the surreal experience to a Salvador Dalí painting.
The bulk of Martzell’s clients haven’t been politicians or celebrities, however. In fact, he says the majority of clients have been the hardworking poor whom he represents in personal injury, class action, and product liability cases. He feels he relates well to these clients due to his summers off from college when his father placed him in grueling jobs in oil fields or at a battery factory.
Rich or poor, Martzell rarely turns down a client. “God left out my judgmental bone,” he says. “The only human foible I can’t tolerate is hypocrisy. It is strange because I’ve overlooked plenty of other flaws, but I find it impossible to represent a client whom I find to be hypocritical.”
Perhaps it’s this aversion to hypocrisy which has given Martzell so much success in the courtroom. After all, he claims straightness and sincerity as his principle strategy.
“Truth is a tactic,” he explains. “Apart from the morality of it, it has a strategic value.” He recalls a client injured in an on-the-job accident being cross-examined by the defense. Every time the defense lawyer believed he scored a point, Martzell’s client would concede it with such a wide-eyed, impressed sincerity that it was disarming. The jury obviously appreciated the man’s candor because it awarded the case to him.
“A favorite saying of mine is, ‘It’s hard to fake sincerity,’” Martzell says. “Sincerity is not necessarily likeability. The jury simply has to think you’re genuine.”
Martzell’s other core strategy in trial work is to adopt a pedagogical mode. He figures that the one experience everyone in the US has in common is they’ve gone to school. Jury members respond to the teacher-student dynamic, and Martzell of course places himself in the teacher role, as an authority on the case because he’s been “dipped in it like an apple in taffy” over the last several months or years. In this professorial mode, he tends to weave his erudition into his oratory, especially using his knowledge of history to illuminate the case at hand and put it into perspective for the jury.
And Martzell is sometimes an actual professor as well. He returns to Notre Dame for a week each year to lecture on trial and appellate work, and he also sometimes visits local law schools. It’s a bromide, but one thing he tells his students is to prepare, prepare, prepare.
Also, they should have no pride of authorship. Basically, they need to look for solutions in unlikely places, not be intimidated to ask more experienced lawyers for advice, and be open to accepting outside ideas. Martzell says these lessons can be hard for young lawyers to learn.
Martzell enjoys teaching, but he claims he could never leave trial work to become a full-time professor. “I enjoy the combat,” he says. “I’d miss the fray.”
Throughout his career, Martzell acknowledges to having done a lot of unpopular things. He’s taken on publicly hated clients, and insurance companies often do an effective job of demonizing trial lawyers. During the Bogalusa period, the Ku Klux Klan even had a contract out on his life, a fact he only learned after the tense racial situation had dissipated.
“Even though I was defending the establishment, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t like the way I was handling the negotiations,” Martzell explains. “Apparently, they thought I was too ‘polite’ with the other side.”
Regardless if someone is loved or hated or a position popular or unpopular, Martzell believes that each person in a legal conflict deserves another whose job it is to think exclusively about his or her interests, and the lawyer is that person. After all, others in society will gladly take sides and pass judgments and hurl accusations. Martzell’s ability to separate the neatness of the law from the many messy and distracting aspects of life opens up to him creative solutions that others might miss. His sharp talents create much of his “forward momentum,” allowing him to take on the diverse range of cases and clients, whoever it may be, drifting through his office door.
