Managing Partner – West Virginia Office, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, LLP
Photo by Rick Lee.
By Jean Hardiman.
Marc Williams’ father encouraged him and his brother, Steve, to lead. Leadership was an expectation his father held in high regard for his sons and one that Marc took to heart through college and law school and now as the managing partner of the West Virginia office of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, LLP.
Williams leads 18 attorneys in the Huntington office and six in the Columbia, SC, office, and he co-chairs the Consumer and Mechanical Product Liability Practice Group. He’s also served as president of three national legal organizations: DRI-The Voice of the Defense Bar, Lawyers for Civil Justice and the National Foundation for Judicial Excellence. Despite all this Southern West Virginia native has achieved outside the courtroom, he considers his greatest professional achievement his handling of more than 100 jury trials and appeals, an increasingly rare achievement that speaks to his clients’ confidence in him.
Williams first decided he wanted to be a trial attorney after reading “The Defense Never Rests” by F. Lee Bailey at age 11. “I was fascinated by Bailey’s stories of representing unpopular defendants,” he says. “From that point on, I was committed to going to law school to be a trial attorney.”
He graduated from Marshall University in 1982, where he served as student body president, and from the West Virginia University (WVU) College of Law in 1985, where he took on the role of president of the law school council. He learned a lot about written and oral advocacy through participation in the Moot Court. “That experience was truly life changing because it introduced me to an intellectual challenge that will be with me for the rest of my life,” he says. “I’ll never stop being fascinated by the theory behind the law and the process of providing justice to people who seek help from the law.”
It was the mentorship of Marshall University President Robert Hayes that led to Williams’ first job in the legal field. He was hired as a law clerk at Huddleston Bolen LLP in Huntington after his first year of law school, and after graduation, he began practicing there.
It was then that he became active in the Defense Trial Counsel of West Virginia, where he was named president in 1995. This launched him into leadership positions with the 23,000-member DRI. He was named president in 2008 and went on to serve as president of Lawyers for Civil Justice from 2013-2014 and president of the National Foundation for Judicial Excellence in 2014-2015.
“Serving as president of three national legal organizations was a wonderful opportunity to work at the national—and in the case of DRI, international—level on issues of importance to the justice system and to lawyers,” he says.
Williams and two partners opened the West Virginia office of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough in 2009. “This firm gives us the goals and expectations for the office and then leaves it to us to execute the plan to fulfill those goals,” he says. “At the same time, the firm gives us all of the resources we need to be successful. That is one of the reasons we’ve been one of the fastest-growing offices in the firm.”
Being part of a national firm has had huge benefits for Williams’ career. “It’s given me exposure to clients and legal matters that I never would have had the opportunity to work with at a smaller firm,” he says. “Also, the larger firm gives me access to lawyers with expertise in an enormous range of practices that can assist my clients.”
Williams’ current focus areas include toxic tort cases, class actions, transportation incidents, commercial disputes and mass joinders of large numbers of plaintiffs. He’s been listed in the Best Lawyers in America in 11 categories and received Chambers USA’s highest designation for commercial litigation. Williams has also been inducted as a fellow in the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers.
All the while, he’s committed time to community volunteerism, pro bono work and mentoring younger attorneys.
“I love my job, so it doesn’t seem like work to me,” he says. “Every day is an opportunity to learn, and I’m intellectually curious about a wide array of topics both related to my work and to my interests outside of work. I’ll never stop learning, and at the same time, I hope I never stop improving as a lawyer, as a leader, as a father, as a husband and as a man.”
