Trigger Warning- Tales from a Life in the Law

Trigger Warning — Tales from a Life in the Law is filled with stories from the time when Brooks Eason decided to go to law school until he settled his last big case and decided he might just be retired.

Brooks Eason grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and decided to become a lawyer because he knew he didn’t want to be a doctor. That’s about all there was to it. He went to law school at Duke, then returned to his home state, where he clerked for a federal judge and spent the next forty years in private practice in Jackson.

Along the way, Brooks collected many stories. He told them over and over, and now he’s written them. Some of them—for example, the times when his ex-wife decided to give raisins to trick-or-treaters at Halloween and when his colleague tried to order pancakes at Waffle House—have nothing to do with the law. But Brooks likes the stories, and it’s his book, so you get what you get. Most of the stories are funny, but some are serious, and one is tragic. Brooks hopes they’re all entertaining.

The title of the book is Trigger Warning because some of the stories are crude and politically incorrect, especially the ones about sexual harassment cases Brooks defended in the years before workplace Lotharios wised up and became more subtle. He could have watered them down and cleaned them up, but he chose instead to write them exactly as they happened, at least to the best of his recollection.

But one proviso needs to be added. Brooks changed some names, sometimes to protect the innocent but more often to protect the dishonest, obnoxious, and incompetent. In his long career in the law, Brooks had the misfortune of having to deal with lawyers who were all three. He chose Dick as the alias for some of the people. You be the judge.