Bradley Pays Tribute to the Late Davis H. Carr, Former Managing Partner

It is with great sadness that Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP announces the passing of retired Bradley Partner Davis H. Carr. Mr. Carr was a well-known and highly regarded business attorney and leader in Nashville who also served from 1984 to 1995 as the Managing Partner of the former Boult Cummings Conners & Berry, which merged with Bradley Arant Rose & White in 2009.

“Davis was a great friend to our firm,” said Bradley Chairman of the Board and Managing Partner Beau Grenier. “Our Bradley family joins with all of Davis’ friends, professional colleagues and former clients in expressing our condolences to his family.”

J. Thomas Trent Jr. , Bradley partner and chairman of the firm’s Economic Development Practice Group, said, “Davis was a brilliant lawyer who had tremendous business acumen and an uncanny insight into people and their motivations. As a result, he was well known as a strategist, counselor and adversary, particularly in negotiating mixed business and legal issues. Davis could move equally well among top business leaders and down home country people, and thoroughly enjoyed both. He was critical in hiring and mentoring a generation or two of the lawyers at our firm, and he will be greatly missed.”

Bradley Partner Robert S. Patterson remembers Mr. Carr as incredibly bright, with a wide range of interests and a huge appetite for life.

“A lot of people pass through our lives without leaving footprints; Davis left footprints,” Mr. Patterson said. “Davis would leave the negotiation of a complex transaction to go home to tend to his rhododendrons, and then relax with a book on some arcane topic. He had a way of cutting through to the essence of a situation, and then capturing it with a witticism. As managing partner, he kept a sign on his desk with a message that captured the essence of law firm management: ‘Do not try to teach a pig to sing; it can’t be done and it frustrates the pig!’ For those of us who knew him well, he will live forever in those memorable sayings that so uniquely captured fundamentals that Davis intuitively grasped.”

Mr. Carr’s practice included business law, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance and venture capital, and e-commerce and technology law. He served as general counsel to several financial institutions and served on the Board of Directors of American Security Bank & Trust Company, First Union Bank of Tennessee, Dominion Bank of Middle Tennessee and Bank of Eagleville.

In addition to his law practice, Mr. Carr was active in the Nashville and Middle Tennessee community. He was a past trustee, vice chair and member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of Fisk University; past chairman of Junior Achievement of Middle Tennessee; and past director, member of the Executive Committee and founding chairman of the Nashville Downtown Partnership. In addition, he previously served as director of the Nashville Symphony Association; as director, member of the Executive Committee, vice-chair for Regional and Governmental Relations and general counsel to the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce; as director of the Greater Nashville Arts Foundation; and as director and president of the Cumberland Museum (now known as Adventure Science Center), of which he is an Honorary Life member. Mr. Carr also was a founder and trustee of the Volunteer State Horsemen's Foundation.

Mr. Carr was a fellow of the Tennessee Bar Foundation and the Nashville Bar Foundation. He earned his J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1970 and a B.E.E. from the University of Virginia.

Contact: Vivian Hood
904.220.1915
 vhood@jaffepr.com