The firm that played a vital role in developing the city’s industrial base is marking 150 years of counsel to Toledo businesses.

In the 1880s, the law practice of Robison, Curphey & O’Connell LLC handled the legal interests of Toledo’s early railroad companies, such as the Norfolk & Western, Norfolk Southern, and Nickel Plate railways that connected Toledo to the rest of the nation.

The firm’s founder, Clarence Brown, and his partner, Frederick Geddes, represented Michael Owens, the inventor of the automatic bottle-making machine whose legacy lives on in the company names of Owens-Illinois, Libbey Owens Ford, and Owens Corning. They also counseled Edmund Drummond Libbey, the glass magnate, industrial financier, and founder of the Toledo Museum of Art.

Wielding great influence over the city’s industries and transportation network, the firm and its partners became key players in first century of the city’s economy.

Today known as RCO Law, it continues to specialize in corporate law to this day, representing clients in the agribusiness, health care, construction, banking, and insurance sectors. It also provides wealth preservation and estate planning services.

The firm is a local version of what was once called a “white shoe” law firm — a powerful old-line partnership that typically handled complex business matters and represented high-net-worth individuals. The name comes from the white buckskin derby shoes that were once the height of upper-class fashion.

Six of the firm’s attorneys eventually became judges, including Jack Zouhary and James R. Knepp II, both of whom serve on the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, and Henry A. Middleton, a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court from 1950 to 1954.

No actual white shoes can be seen at the firm’s current offices at Four SeaGate in downtown Toledo, but other tells are present. Classical music purrs softly in the reception area. The views of the Maumee River are impressive. The conference room chairs are deeply padded. People there speak in hushed tones, as if imparting highly confidential information to a privileged confidant. Golf is a topic of conversation. 

Mr. Brown, who started the practice in 1874, took on Mr. Geddes as a partner in 1882. By 1905, the firm was known as Brown, Geddes, Schmettau & Williams.

In addition to practicing law, Mr. Brown was a powerful and well-known member of the Toledo business community. Over his professional career, he was the president of the Owens Bottle Machine Co. and the Toledo Times Publishing Co., a director of the Hocking Valley Railway Co., the Toledo, St. Louis & Western Railroad, and the Ohio State Telephone Co., and vice-president of the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Co., the Toledo Glass Co., and the Owens European Bottle Machine Co.

In his presumably scarce spare time, Mr. Brown served on the advisory committee of the Toledo Hospital and as a trustee of the Toledo Museum of Art. When he died in 1918, his obituary ran on the front page of the Toledo News-Bee.

The current name of the law firm he founded dates from 1964 and memorializes the troika of Jim Robison, John Curphey, and Maurice “Mickey” O’Connell who took control of the firm after more senior partners died or retired.

Those three attorneys are no longer living, but Mr. O’Connell’s widow, Joan O’Connell, recalls that her husband was very tight-lipped about his business.

“They don’t talk much about their work,” she said, referring to the lawyers her husband worked with. “That’s part of the way they are. That’s part of the ethos of the legal profession. I knew the two other partners and their wives, but we didn’t socialize.”

The firm today

Today RCO Law has offices in Toledo, Findlay, and Waterville. It has 16 partners, seven associates, one senior attorney, and 14 attorneys of counsel to the firm. Of these, 26 are men and 12 are women.

While the practice of law has changed in many ways since 1874, Robison, Curphey & O’Connell’s practice areas are substantially the same as they were back when the firm began. It is still primarily a corporate law firm. It continues to represent O-I Glass, the successor to Owens-Illinois. It serves as counsel to both of Toledo’s large health-care networks, ProMedica and Mercy Health. It defends medical malpractice claims. It provides legal services to the area’s educational institutions. It also offers estate planning and asset protection advice to individuals and families.

The firm’s income stream is diversified, with no single client providing more than 10 percent of revenue.

“Today we are known for our representation of family-held and smaller businesses,” said the firm’s managing partner, Peter Lavalette, a man who seems born to the work of confidently steering the firm, assuring clients that their affairs are in capable hands, and serving as the voice of a 150-year-old institution.

“We provide a good dose of ‘the Toledo way,’ something unique to our market,” Mr. Lavalette said. “This is a small town. So instead of filing a seven-page brief seeking schedule changes, I can pick up he phone and make an agreement with opposing counsel without going to court about it. It makes it a better place to practice law — and we play a big role in preserving that culture.”

“Finesse and nuance are a big part of what we sell,” he added.

As for the firm itself, Mr. Lavalette said that its goal is to sustain slow but steady growth and to nurture client relationships with an assurance of continuity.

“I want to make sure that the clients I’ve taken care of for 20 or 30 years will continue to be taken care of by the younger members of the firm,” he said. 

Achieving that goal is made easier by the firm’s very low turnover rate. Even lawyers who have been recruited by larger, better-paying firms have generally opted to stay with RCO Law.

Mr. Lavalette emphasized that the firm strongly encourages its lawyers to get involved in the community.

“We take a lot of leadership roles in faith communities, school boards, and nonprofits,” he said. “We tell our young lawyers to get involved with something in the community. We don’t care what it is, so long as it’s something they love.”

The firm does pro bono work for Habitat for Humanity, providing basic estate planning for new property owners. In September, RCO’s Findlay-based attorneys and staff built a Habitat home there. It also sponsors 14 golf outings per year around that state that support community nonprofit organizations such as the YMCA and the Cherry Street Mission. As part of its 150th anniversary celebrations, the firm made a $10,000 gift to the Goodwill Industries Foundation.

Its attorneys also get together once a year in northern Michigan for a weekend retreat.

“You get know people in a different way, doing that,” Mr. Lavalette said.

Changing with the times

Julia Wiley, the first female attorney to make partner at the firm, was hired in 1984. And she’s still there.

“John Curphey made me join,” she said. “I was at Ohio State and was already dressed in a suit to do interviews at a recruiting event. Someone asked if I would interview with a firm from Toledo and I said ‘absolutely not.’ But they told me that they had come all the way from Toledo, so I finally agreed.”

The interview didn’t proceed like the others she’d had.

“He didn’t want to talk about law school,” Ms. Wiley remembered. “He spent time asking about my hobbies, my life goals, and what I liked to do. He went way outside the scripted questions I’d expected. And he had the greatest little chuckle and laugh. That convinced me to come to Toledo for a second interview. And I decided I could fit in well here. I still wasn’t sold on Toledo, but I’m still here 40 years later.”

Ms. Wiley recalled that in the mid-’80s having female attorneys in established law firms was a big topic of discussion.

“It came up over and over in my interviews that private law firms needed to be more welcoming to women,” she said. “Some firms were saying they had senior partners who were very resistant to the idea of women as partners.”

Once she began at RCO Law, however, she found an an environment that was as welcoming as any she could have imagined.

“The awkwardness was as much mine as it was in the other direction,” she said. “But the guys there were great people and went out of their way to form professional relationships with me. And soon after I arrived, there were several other women hired.”

Ms. Wiley’s experience was somewhat different from that of one of the firm’s newest associates, Kate Murray. 

“Every law firm stresses its work-life balance, but they really mean it here,” she said. “Everyone is very friendly and welcoming. And I don’t think I’m treated differently because I’m younger. Maybe I have less autonomy, but not much less. As you progress, they let go of the reins a little bit.”

Ms. Murray has not regretted her decision to come to work for a medium-sized firm.

“It’s easy to be persuaded by the money that big firms and big law can offer,” she said, “but you’re not going to have the same kind of career. You’ll do the same thing and never get to try anything else. You’re less pigeonholed here as a young attorney.”

Ms. Wiley is bemused by her memories of the group lunches that all attorneys at the firm used to attend every day promptly at 11:35 a.m.

“That was Mr. Robison’s schedule,” she said “He got in early and was hungry by then. So that’s when we all had lunch. We all sat together at one big table. And the topic of discussion was generally sports. Every time I’d try to introduce a different topic, they’d look at me — and go back to the sports talk.”

Had those men been more ecumenical in their choice of lunchtime conversation, they would have discovered in Ms. Wiley a mix of steel and good humor and a person with interests well beyond the ordinary. How many people besides her have a kiln at home so they can pursue their interest in making fused glass?

Ms. Wiley is also passionate about history — and in particular, the Battle of Fallen Timbers. She has served as president of the Fallen Timbers Battlefield Commission, which recently created a pop-up museum in Waterville dedicated to that event. 

“That took a year of research and writing,” she recalls.

She is also the first vice president of the Waterville Historical Society and next year will serve as president of the Waterville Area Chamber of Commerce.

“I like working with history organizations to create strategy and long-range planning,” she said. “If you own five buildings, you’d better have a plan to keep them up.”

Secretarial support evolves

While the practice of law has evolved in the last 40 years, its fundamentals remain fairly constant. But the same is not true of the work performed by the firm’s support staff, whose roles have changed considerably.

“In 40 years, my job description has totally changed,” said Kim Bryant, who still works as a secretary for the firm. “When I started, I was the only person in the firm who had a computer. We used to sit all day typing with our Dictaphones on.

“Nowadays the younger attorneys prepare their own court filings and email them to us to e-file with the court and serve on opposing counsel,” said Linda Rosinski, who will mark 42 years as a secretary with the firm on Jan. 3. “In 40 years, the job description has totally changed.”

She contrasted today’s workflow with the way things used to be.

“A lot of attorneys used to hand-write their filings and give them to us to type,” she said. “Then they’d mark up our work with the changes they wanted made, which meant we had to type the whole document over.”

Forty years ago, the firm employed 12 secretaries. Today there are six — a stark example of how technology has transformed the workplace. But even in an age of autocorrect and word processing, secretaries continue to play an important role.

“We do the proofing. We find mistakes,” Ms. Rosinski said.

“If we don’t do the work, the work doesn’t get out,” Ms. Bryant added.

With a combined tenure of over 80 years, these two women are important repositories of the firm’s institutional memory. 

“We know where to find things,” Ms. Rosinski said, with a knowing glance.

The firm looks to the future

As is true of many professions, lawyers and law firms are looking toward the changes that will be wrought by the widespread use of artificial intelligence. 

“We already have a committee that is studying AI,” Mr. Lavalette said. “But we have to be very careful. AI takes user data and pushes it up into the cloud — and we lose control over it.”

Several RCO Law attorneys mentioned a recent occurrence in which a Texas federal judge sanctioned an attorney for filing an AI-generated pleading that was full of citations to nonexistent cases and fabricated quotations. The attorney who submitted that pleading was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and attend a continuing education course about the use of generative AI in the practice of law.

The firm has a policy that prohibits the use of ChatGPT and similar applications in the creation of client work product.

Mr. Lavalette ventured that AI may have some uses in form-driven areas of law — but even then, he said, it needs close supervision due to the risk of AI hallucinations.

Ms. Wiley’s reaction to AI was much more blunt: “AI makes me want to retire,” she said.

Even Ms. Murray, one of the firm’s most junior associates, was apprehensive about an AI-driven future for the profession.

“AI kind of terrifies me,” Ms. Murray said. “I suppose for drafting enclosure letters or very simple documents maybe it’s OK, but even there we have an amazing support staff who can personalize things. AI can’t do that.”

Another topic that’s roiling the legal profession is the question of whether law firms should be permitted to merge with financial services providers such as accounting firms. 

“There’s been some resistance to that around the country, and people are watching that very carefully,” Mr. Lavalette said. “There’s a long history of law firms only being allowed to be owned or controlled by attorneys.”

Though other states are moving toward allowing such mergers, Mr. Lavalette thinks that Ohio is a long way from making such a change in law and tradition. And he was clear that such a change in management and control would not happen at RCO Law.

“We’re going to remain focused on individual client relationships,” he said. 

First Published December 1, 2024, 12:30 p.m.