Attorney’s well-laid plans on line before judgeship rival edged out
Mac Norton was just 578 votes away from having his welllaid plans blow up in his face.
Norton, who has been practicing law in Pine Bluff for more than four decades, was a candidate for a circuit judge position that hears family-law cases from Jefferson and Lincoln counties.
When voters went to the polls in March, there were three candidates running for that position. But no one received enough votes for a win, and Norton ended up in a runoff with Therese Free, another Pine Bluff attorney, in a race that would not be settled until the November general election.
Norton prevailed on Nov. 3 by a vote of 10,080 to 9,503, but it was a tougher race than he had imagined, and it put him closer than he wanted to negating all of the preparations he had been making.
The seven months he had to wait to find out which way his life was headed was a long time to contemplate his future, and for an attorney who takes cases that can go on for many months, it was especially problematic. To get ready to be a judge, Norton couldn’t wait until Nov. 4 to start winding down his practice. He had to have every case he was working on finalized by the time he got sworn in and put on a robe on Jan. 4, “when I need to hit the floor running,” he said.
“I had already been handing off cases,” he said one recent afternoon as he worked in his office on East Eighth Avenue. Earlier in the day, he had been retrieving campaign signs in Lincoln County. “If I knew that it was likely that I couldn’t finish a case by the end of this year, I was passing it on.”
Those passed-on cases included criminal, civil and custody cases, he said.
“You have to decline these cases,” he said. “Someone would say, ‘I want you to take the case,’ and I’ve have to say, ‘I understand you want me, but it’s not right. We’ve got to find you someone who will take your case for the next eight or 10 months.’”
Pushing away potentially lengthy cases to other attorneys meant pushing away income for Norton, which, again, was a dicey thing to do considering what
might or might not happen on Election Day. Consequently, every potential case that walked in the door had to be weighed against how quickly it could be handled, with many of them waved on to other counselors. And it was something he said he had talked over with his wife, Susan.
“I told my wife that things might get a little tight financially,” he said. “When you can’t take retainers, there’s just no money coming in.”
And, of course, had he lost the election, all of that lost revenue would have been for naught.
None of this would have happened had the runoff between Norton and Free taken place a few weeks after the primary vote in May similar to the way other primary races are handled. Had that happened, Norton and all other private attorneys who were running for judiciary positions and were in runoffs would have had plenty of time to bring their personal practices to a close by the end of the year.
But that’s not the way the system is designed. Asked why state judiciary officials put off the runoff until the general election, Norton said he doesn’t think they care.
“Many of the people running for judgeships have built-in incomes,” he said, meaning that they work for public institutions such as a prosecutor’s office, and don’t have to worry about dissolving a private business or a diminishing paycheck as they prepare for possibly winning the position. “They don’t think about the private attorneys running for office.”
And with such a waitand-see situation, Norton said, some potential clients were rooting for him to win, but they weren’t going to be completely unhappy if he lost.
“No doubt about it, having to wait until November is a game-changer,” he said. “I had a handful of people waiting to see if I lost and could take their case.”
“I told my wife that things might get a little tight financially. When you can’t take retainers, there’s just no money coming in.”
— Mac Norton, circuit judge-elect for Jefferson and Lincoln counties