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Days before he died nearly one year ago, legendary plaintiffs lawyer Fred Baron told his wife and law partner Lisa Blue-Baron that he wanted John Edwards to speak at his memorial service. But Blue-Baron would have none of that.
Baron, 61, died on Oct. 30, 2008, after battling cancer. He had helped guide and finance two Democratic presidential bids for Edwards, a former plaintiffs lawyer and Baron's best friend.
But Blue-Baron says she decided Edwards should not speak at her husband's memorial service. In August 2008, Edwards admitted he'd had an extramarital affair and having him eulogize Baron "would have been the story. It wouldn't have been about Fred," she says.
Defying her husband's wish is only one of the difficult decisions Blue-Baron has made since 2002; that's when Baron discovered he had plasmacytoma, a precursor to a fatal form of bone-marrow cancer. Doctors told the couple Baron would likely live only a few more years.
"What do you do when you have more money than God and you find out you are not going to live long? It's fascinating," says Susan Hays, a former chairwoman of the Dallas Democratic Party and a partner in Dallas' Geisler Hays who knew the Barons from political circles.
The couple, which had become wealthy representing plaintiffs in asbestos litigation, reorganized their priorities, chief among them having children (they added three) and ensuring Edwards took the White House (which was not meant to be).
Now approaching the first anniversary of her husband's death, Blue-Baron's to-do list remains daunting. She is attempting to carry on his philanthropic and political agendas while reconfiguring her own life and career. "When Fred died my life changed overnight," she says.
"Lisa is left not only with Fred's legacy but with some of his commitments," says plaintiffs lawyer W. Mark Lanier, a family friend and colleague.
At 57, Blue-Baron is raising her three daughters alone — 3-year-old Alessandra and 1-year-old twins Nathalie and Caroline. The twins, born only weeks before Baron's death, are legally blind due to a genetic condition, Blue-Baron says.
The four of them live in a 15,254-square-foot home worth $17.3 million in Dallas' tony Preston Hollow neighborhood — the same home where the Barons threw lavish parties and fundraisers attended by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Emmitt Smith, Alec Baldwin and Don Henley, among others, Blue-Baron says.
She now oversees the Baron & Blue Foundation, a Dallas-based charity she and Baron set up that offers assistance to the homeless and displaced. And she is trying to continue her husband's political activities. In the first six months of 2009, she contributed more than $528,000 to the Texas Democratic Trust, a political action committee initiated by the Barons and credited with helping Democrats win local and legislative races in Texas in 2006.
"She has internalized the vision of the trust. This isn't about one cycle. This is about making this a state with two competitive political parties," says Matt Angle, director of the trust. "Lisa is brilliant. She has a clear view of what she wants. She is not scared to make a decision."
Blue-Baron says, "I am just figuring out where I am comfortable."
Then there is her career, which is flourishing. Earlier this month, Blue-Baron — a jury consultant and civil trial litigator — launched a joint venture with Lanier to provide arbitration services in Europe. She also serves as co-counsel with Lanier representing Southern Methodist University and its officials in their litigation battle about the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
Lanier says he and Blue-Baron have mapped out at least two cases they will litigate together in the coming year. "We have room for a third," says Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm in Houston.
Lanier says Blue-Baron keeps practicing even though she doesn't need the money. Doing so keeps her around people she cares about, he says. "Lisa does it because she likes it. That is where her friends are. That's the community she has lived in."
Baron & Budd of counsel Brent Rosenthal, who practiced with the Barons before they left the firm in 2003, says, "There are a lot of people that are concerned about her," he says, adding that if anybody can meet a challenge, she can.
Hays believes Blue-Baron will surprise people who were so focused on her high-wattage husband. "She is not someone who likes to draw attention to herself, so when he was here, people may not have noticed her. But she is meticulous about everything she does."
Larger Than Life
A former teacher, Blue-Baron earned a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of North Texas in Denton in 1978. As a clinical psychologist, she saw lawyers as patients and began to get involved in trial work as a jury consultant and as a forensic psychologist. That's why she decided to go to law school, graduating from South Texas College of Law in Houston in 1980.
That year she married Baron, a larger-than-life figure whose name and fame became synonymous with asbestos litigation.
Baron had two children from a previous marriage. Blue-Baron says her only previous boyfriend was a college chum who was "really more of a friend." Baron was her true love, she says.
He gave her half his equity stake in Baron & Budd when they wed but she didn't go to work there immediately. Instead, she became an assistant district attorney in Dallas, handling, by her count, 150 criminal trials. She joined Baron & Budd in 1986 and began trying toxic-tort suits. Unlike her husband, she loved trial work. "Fred loved settling and firm management. His gift was problem-solving," she says.
In 2002, Baron injured his shoulder during a Baron & Budd ski trip to Taos, N.M. That's when doctors learned that Baron had plasmacytoma. He did not want anyone to know because he didn't want to be treated differently because of his illness, Blue-Baron says. So the couple kept his condition a secret for five-and-a-half years — and they kept working.
With his diagnosis, Blue-Baron recalls, she and her husband asked each other: "How do you want to spend the rest of your life?"
"He wanted to do something different if he didn't have long to live," she says, so he focused on presidential politics. "I wasn't going to tell him 'no' to anything," she recalls.
Blue-Baron's wish was to have children. "I wanted a piece of Fred," she says. So in 2003, they sold their equity interest in Baron & Budd, which Baron had started in 1975, and they began planning for the birth of their children, each conceived with the help of an egg donor and carried to term by two different surrogate mothers. In 2004, while serving as campaign finance chairman for Edwards' first presidential bid, the couple launched the Texas Democratic Trust.
In 2006, Baron bought a house and moved to North Carolina to manage Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign. Blue-Baron opted to stay in Dallas to continue practicing and doing jury consulting while taking care of the couple's first child. She says she helped Baron with the Edwards campaign. "I did what I hate to do; I raised money for him," Blue-Baron says.
She recalls that period in their life as good. "Fred felt well. He was happy," she says.
Edwards' presidential bid looked promising, Blue-Baron says, and she hoped that if he won, she might be nominated for an ambassadorship, possibly somewhere in Europe. She says she studied with a tutor almost daily learning French, Spanish and Italian so she would be prepared. (Now she expects her language skills to come in handy as an arbitrator working with Lanier on their new European venture.)
But it wasn't smooth sailing. In August 2006, the couple sued Baron & Budd, shareholder Russell Budd and others over payments they alleged they were owed from the sale of their equity interest in the firm to Budd. The defendants denied the allegations, and in June 2007, the two sides settled.
Then came the Edwards scandal. After Edwards acknowledged his affair with former campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, Baron started fielding calls from reporters even though he was in the hospital with intravenous tubes attached to both arms. He couldn't hold the telephone, so Blue-Baron says she held it up to his ear.
Baron told Texas Lawyer at the time that in late 2007 he helped Hunter, former Edwards presidential campaign worker Andrew Young, Young's wife and the Youngs' three children relocate to California from North Carolina, because they were being hounded by tabloid reporters and paparazzi. "I paid for them to relocate to another home in another state," Baron said, adding that he paid for several months of rent on a house in Santa Barbara, Calif., out of his own pocket and didn't inform Edwards. "I never discussed it with John. He was on the campaign trail in Iowa at the time," Baron said. He also noted that Hunter and Andrew Young were not employed by the Edwards campaign at the time he helped them move.
Blue-Baron says her husband, as chairman of Edwards' campaign finance committee, gave the money to help Andrew Young, for whom he felt empathy and a responsibility. "Anything that Fred paid to them was done from his personal account," she says.
Throughout Baron's life, he helped friends and acquaintances financially. "He gave loans to people all over the place who are never going to pay back," Blue-Baron says.
In the newspapers, the Edwards controversy continues to unfold. According to a Sept. 19 article in The New York Times, prosecutors have convened a federal grand jury in Raleigh, N.C., investigating "a complicated and novel legal issue: whether payments to a candidate's mistress to ensure her silence (and thus maintain the candidate's viability) should be considered campaign donations and thus whether they should be reported."
Wade Smith, a partner in Tharrington Smith in Raleigh who represents Edwards, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
George E.B. Holding, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, says his office will not confirm or deny an investigation.
"I am hoping and praying that I'm left out of that Edwards mess," Blue-Baron says. She has not been asked to testify before the grand jury in Raleigh or to send any documents to prosecutors, she adds.
Despite her husband's death, Blue-Baron remains optimistic about the future. She expects to focus her political contributions on local and state Democratic races, rather than national ones. She looks forward to working with Lanier, who she calls "the guy I call up at 4 in the morning," because she values and trusts his advice.
Lanier says he and Blue-Baron are early-risers so pre-dawn e-mails fly back and forth. He says he has provided her with the kind of financial soundboard he hopes someone would provide his wife if he were gone. He and his wife, Becky, serve as a surrogate aunt and uncle to Blue-Baron's children.
"Fred was a large part of her life. Her business partner, her best friend, her husband and her lawyer partner," Lanier says. No one could replace all that.
