Born to be a Lawyer

From the May-June 2005 edition of The Pennsylvania Lawyer:

Born to Be a Lawyer

By Ted Stellwag (executive director emeritus of the PBA)

William Philip Carlucci is “obsessed.” He offers that adjective without hesitation when asked to describe himself in a single word. His office wall seconds the motion. Hung alongside the wisdom of Cicero are words of more personal significance. “Everything in excess … to enjoy the full flavor of life, take … big bites.”

He is about to take a very big bite. On May 6, the 49-year-old Williamsport lawyer will become the 111th president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association.

Bill Carlucci defines his life by his work. “I don’t relax well. In fact, I don’t relax at all.” His son, Benjamin, calls him “obsessed” as a “criticism … not a compliment.” A normal workday begins shortly after 7 a.m. and ends around 11 p.m. “If you’re going that many hours, you can get a lot done,” he says.

“I come from a family where work is … something you take pride in.”

Mary Carlucci, his mother, works almost full time at age 76. She sells shoes in a department store and “tries to convince 16-year-old girls who weigh 185 pounds they shouldn’t wear stiletto heels.”

His father, Philip, was a trouble-shooting manager for a major shoe company. That work caused the family to move five times in six years, landing finally in Loyalsock near Williamsport where they took root.

Carlucci believes he was “born to be a lawyer.” He decided on a legal career in seventh grade, although he never met a lawyer until he was 19 years old. His father died and an attorney was retained to do the estate.

Carlucci was a gifted student in high school and, in his words, a “textbook nerd.” He captained the debate team, demonstrating a talent for persuasion. As a commuting honors student at Lycoming College he carried a double major in political science and interdisciplinary studies. He debated issues with faculty during a weekly lunch and graduated magna cum laude in three years.

As the second-youngest law student in his class at Temple, he found the “older girls thought … being in a study group with a 20-year-old boy was kind of cute.” Carlucci won a moot court competition and a litigation award. He graduated in 1979 and went home looking for work. “I don’t think people get jobs out here based upon their academic credentials,” he says. “They get jobs based on who they know. … I didn’t know a lawyer.”

Carlucci was hired as an associate in the law office of Henry Perciballi. “I learned a lot from the first lawyer who gave me a job” and “from every lawyer I ever met.” After two years he signed on as an assistant district attorney, working 70-hour weeks. It was a smorgasbord of experience for a young lawyer. “I was doing preliminary hearings and jury trials and appellate briefs … and wiretap work.”  Carlucci co-authored the brief and successfully argued the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s wiretap act in Commonwealth v. Doty.

He joined his present firm as an associate in 1985 and became a shareholder in three years. Elion Wayne Grieco Carlucci Shipman & Irwin P.C. occupies a former funeral home. Stained glass windows soften the front façade of the vine-covered building and an ancient wisteria dominates a back garden.  There is a bus station across the street and the Busy Bee luncheonette, a local institution for more than a generation. Coffee is 60 cents and the tin ceiling is authentic.

Carlucci says the nine-member firm is “a pure democracy. … If there’s an issue, we meet to discuss it.” He does commercial litigation, contract negotiation and drafting, but believes a concentrated practice is “cost ineffective. … In a place like Williamsport, it’s impossible to generate much money doing that kind of work.” The area economy, which boomed with lumber mills a century ago, now slumbers with little industry. Even Grit, the venerable newspaper of a more homespun era, is gone.  Little League Baseball remains as a visible presence but not a major employer. Yet Carlucci enjoys life in his small town. “I can go to a bar picnic and … not have to be introduced to anybody. I pretty much know them.” 

He was president of the local bar, the Lycoming Law Association, when he met former PBA president Joseph H. Jones in town for a Law Day event. Jones suggested he consider serving as PBA Zone 4 governor. “I was … what I now call a ‘mailbox member.’ I had no particular aspirations.”  Somehow the advice stuck.

In 1993, Bill Carlucci took his seat on the PBA Board of Governors. He later won another term, the first zone governor to repeat in that office, which he calls “the most important in the bar association.  Every zone governor has an obligation to stay in touch with the county bars and be a liaison.” He treasures a watercolor print of the Pennsylvania Bar Center signed by each board member in 1996. It too hangs on his office wall.

Carlucci has served the association and its members in several ways over the past dozen years.  His assignments included leadership roles with a task force on technology and law office management and another on affiliated organizations. He has been a PBI course planner and lecturer and a member of its board of directors. Carlucci earned a PBA President’s Award in 1996 for opening an office for lawyers to assist local flood victims. “What I did was pretty unremarkable,” he says. “[It’s] what every lawyer would do in that instance.”

Bill Carlucci has seen the photographs of all the former presidents hung in neat rows at the Bar Center. He confesses to “an uneasy honor being among them. … Most of the people … were giants in the law. I don’t feel that way at all.”

C. LaRue Munson is there on the wall, unsmiling in a starched collar and tidy mustache. He led the association in 1902-03, the only other Lycoming County lawyer to serve as president. Munson had offices in Williamsport and Manhattan and taught at Yale Law School. He was one of the founders at the first PBA meeting at Bedford Springs in 1895 and is named on the charter. The second president from Lycoming County is certain his “tongue would fall out” if he claimed kinship with many of his larger-than-life predecessors.

Carlucci has thought a lot about his role as president within the mission of the association. “I can’t define it any better than those guys at Bedford Springs, but I can certainly put my spin on it.” He will spend a lot of road time, reinforcing the association’s emphasis on “a listening ear. … It’s always been there. Members have always had significant opportunities for input. Our marketing has grown to make sure [they] know about it.” The association will survey members to gather opinion on the value of benefits and services — and what to add or subtract.

Bill Carlucci has witnessed dramatic changes in his quarter century of lawyering and has seen PBA’s member benefits evolve in response. “The practice of law has become very difficult. We have an obligation to … speak to lawyers about their unique needs” and “do everything we can to make it easier.” He wants to visit “every county bar that will have me and ask them point blank. ‘What do you love about the practice, what not — and how can the bar help?’ ”

As an example, Carlucci believes PBA’s InCite program has “leveled the playing field” for solo and small firm practitioners doing computer-assisted research. “The vast majority of lawyers … do not enjoy the resources available to big law firms. We have a unique opportunity to deliver some of those resources.”

He will ask the association to re-examine the meetings format, “to be sure we’re delivering the most value to members … and make those meetings all they can be, given our financial resources.” Also, at his request, seminars will be held in three locations “to support … lawyers who have an interest in public service” and “give them some notion of what they need to do.” Carlucci wants to continue strengthening the association’s presence with county bars, committees and sections, and the Legislature. He knows the value of personal contact “between the bar and every member of the General Assembly, to explain our position on legislation.” He believes PBA is “uniquely well suited to be the voice for lawyers. It’s an opportunity we can and must embrace … one that is relevant to every lawyer. … Just the advocacy on Capitol Hill is worth more than the dues.”

Carlucci is troubled by questions about the relevance of the bar and by attorneys who have not joined. “We have 29,000 … lawyers. We should have all of them.” He says there’s “not much desire to brag … [to tell] lawyers all the good things we do for them. … Ninety-nine percent of what the organized bar does lawyers never see. … It’s incredible to me that any lawyer in Pennsylvania would say [they] don’t need an open line of communication with every other lawyer in Pennsylvania.”

All the presidents on the Bar Center wall brought their own special gifts to the job. This man comes to the office with a contagious enthusiasm, a probing intellect and the perspective of a small county practitioner. “I don’t get tired … and I seem to bring out the talents in others,” he says when asked about his own. On the downside, “I can’t remember people’s names” and “my son says … I work too compulsively at everything.” It echoes another motto hung on his office wall: “Moderation is for monks.”

Bill Carlucci believes “it’s unseemly … to aspire to honors … I don’t see the presidency as an honor so much as a very important job.” His next words are spoken slowly, with proper emphasis. “I intend to spend the time to do it as well as I can.” The man who will lead the Pennsylvania Bar Association has another special gift passed down from his parents. He knows the value of hard work and the quiet satisfaction of a job done well.

Carlucci on …

• Advertising … His firm doesn’t advertise “because the nine of us think it’s counterproductive I’m not going to insult lawyers who advertise.” He says the U.S. Supreme Court “embraced” lawyer advertising because of a “perception the public is better off having the information than not …, but the bar is a lot worse off. The public perception of lawyers is not enhanced. The converse is true.”
• Billable hours … He believes the emphasis on billable hours is the “most negative change” in his 25 years of practice. “It affects everybody. … The whole notion of focusing on how many hours lawyers spend practicing as opposed to what they achieve is just complete nonsense.” Carlucci says associates who must produce more than 2,000 billable hours a year “either relegate every other aspect of [their] life to the law or [they] have to lie — or both.”
• Lawyer jokes … “As long as there have been people in positions of influence, there have been jokes about [them]. … The problem is not that lawyer jokes are mean-spirited. The problem is that people don’t realize how little influence lawyers actually have. I’m much more offended by racist or ethnic jokes or jokes directed at a religion. …”
• Law schools … Carlucci served on a task force to shape “a strategy to improve legal education.” He says after a few meetings “it was clear to me that law schools are not particularly interested in input from practicing lawyers. … Lawyers like me are not likely to call law schools for information on how to practice law and they don’t call us. … That change is going to have to come from within.”
• Legal and medical care … “I suppose my father died from being sick in 1975 rather than 2005 … I’m absolutely certain that if he had the same medical condition today, they would have fixed it in minutes. … Medical care and legal work are dynamic arts. The legal services we can deliver today are a whole lot better than 20 years ago.”
• Local and administrative rules … “We have 67 counties, each … wants to write its own version of the Pennsylvania Rules of Civil Procedure. That’s bad enough. We’ve created areas of administrative law [writing] much faster than the Legislature writes laws and it’s literally impossible for anyone to keep track of that.”
• Preceptorship … “There’s a lot of merit to it, but reasonable minds may differ [on] how we go about it. … I think the best plan might be two years of law school [and] one year where they’re actually working in a … private firm but go back to law school from time to time … [to] share experience, use the resources of the law school to learn from what they’re doing in their firms. There’s something like that in the residency programs at teaching hospitals ... except rather than having the residency taught by a law firm, it would be by the law school.”
• Proper dress … “I don’t share the notion that lawyers look better in T-shirts and jeans.”

The Family . . .

One of Bill Carlucci’s favorite early memories is traveling to family reunions in Scranton. “[T]hey probably got together every Sunday. … You ate until you couldn’t move. … Italians make love to food.” His father’s Italian heritage was balanced by his mother’s mix of County Cork and lowland Scot.

Bill and Christine Carlucci married in 1988. Chris is a practicing dental hygienist. Her father, O William Vanderlin, Esq., was general counsel of Little League Baseball. Carlucci includes his late father-in-law on a personal list of lawyer heroes The Carluccis have three children. Laura Yeager, 25, works in a home for profoundly retarded adults in Williamsport.

 She graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Lynn Yeager, 23, is in her final year at West Chester University. Benjamin Carlucci, 16, followed his father to Loyalsock High School. “He’s doing better than I did,” his dad says.

Carlucci’s younger brother, Philip, lives in Rhode Island. He is vice president of Hasbro Toy Co., which gave the world Mr. Potato Head. 

Community Activities . . .

Mary Carlucci fretted that her oldest son’s nose was always in a book. He says scouting was “my mother’s attempt to introduce me to the out-of-doors. … [She] walked me into a meeting when I was 11 years old. … Scouting has played a very significant role in my life.”

Bill Carlucci has been a scoutmaster and president of the Susquehanna Council of Boy Scouts of America, serving a five-county area. He continues on the council’s governing body and on a national BSA board, which operates “high adventure” scout bases. A former Life Scout, Carlucci has earned five scouting leadership awards. Daughters Laura and Lynn were Girl Scouts, and his son Ben recently became an Eagle Scout.

 In addition …

He was a three-time president of the Loyalsock Kiwanis, Kiwanian of the Year and a lieutenant governor representing 15 clubs in the region.

Carlucci is a past president of the Loyalsock Volunteer Fire Company and a member for over 30- years, “but I haven’t put out a fire in a long time — not that kind of fire.”

He has been a certified emergency medical technician since 1974 and a volunteer on the National Ski Patrol. “Skiing is not a very deadly sport, but it’s pretty dangerous.”

Carlucci has lectored at St. Ann’s Catholic Church since 1979. He was a member of his township’s planning commission for three years. “They wanted me to help rewrite their zoning ordinance. … I found that out at the first meeting.”

Also, Carlucci has been a visiting lecturer at Lycoming College, teaching civil rights and liberties. He says of his former students. “They liked me a whole lot better at the end of the course than at the beginning.”