Precedents and what ifs.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UP FRONT - A feed back of the annual Legal Elite package - Editorial

A picture, so goes the Chinese proverb, is worth more than a thousand words. As part of our annual Legal Elite package, we had always written short profiles of the lawyers that received the most votes in each category, but this year decided to let photographs do most of the talking. In a nod to the new category for best young lawyers, we assigned Steve Exum to shoot the other winners in settings evoking early jobs that had influenced their later legal careers.

We sent each of the top vote getters a questionnaire, asking them to elaborate on that topic and other subjects, one of which was: What would you be if you weren't a lawyer? A lot of what they had to say got boiled down to fit into the boxes accompanying the pictures. But I thought I'd share in toto the answer of Doug Kenyon, the Hunton & Williams partner who heads this year's list of best antitrust lawyers. Whether just daydreaming or not, the man definitely has given the matter some thought.

"I'd own and manage the best music club in NYC, and I'd expand it to Raleigh. The clubs would be open Tuesday-Saturday night and would attract the best upcoming singer/songwriter talent in the country. Once a week, I'd have a 'songwriters in the round' session, kind of like the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where established songwriters would get together 'in the round' and play in turn. And one night a week I'd have a 'struggling...