The lawyer who won the reversal of nearly $600,000 in legal fees and a damaging federal judge’s order is a second-generation Alabama Supreme Court justice with the smooth drawl of Southern gentry, the kind with soft “r” sounds.
R. Bernard Harwood Jr., founding partner of Rosen Harwood in Tuscaloosa, spoke for Burr & Forman at oral arguments in Atlanta Jan. 27 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Harwood distilled five years of litigation and a fatal mistake over court jurisdiction into a question of intent, arguing that sanctioning lawyers in this case requires a finding of bad faith—and that there was none.
