2018 AWARDS
Joseph A. Wallace
Co-Owner and Attorney, Wallace Law Offices
In reality, the clients choose us— usually because of our reputation. We are guardians of the law, and we want all people to have justice.”
Photo by John Wallace, IV.
BY SAMANTHA CART. Growing up in Elkins, WV, Joseph Wallace, a scrappy kid who often found himself in the middle of a fight with a much bigger opponent, found his greatest inspiration in his mother, Nancy, and his older brother, Jack, who considered themselves the three musketeers.
“ For me it was the world against the three of us, and I was ready for the fight,” he says.“ My brother served our country during the Korean War as an officer in the Marines. Leadership by example is the personal characteristic that has had the greatest influence on my success— I learned that from my brother, who was a leader of men but never in his life shouted an order. My mother was also my mentor. She was a widow at age 35 and went back to college at age 55 to obtain a degree to teach. Nancy and Jack were exceptional people because of their character, their consideration for others and the strength of their love.”
In the spring of 1960 at his graduation from Michigan State University, Wallace was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U. S. Army. He went on to attend West
Wallace, bottom right, posing for a team photo with the Elkins High School basketball team.
Virginia University( WVU) College of Law that fall, but he was called to active duty as a result of the Berlin Crisis in 1961. Instead of returning to Morgantown for his second year of law school to learn about torts, contracts and civil procedures, he was sent to El Paso, Texas, to learn how to use high-flying ground-toair missiles in an attack.
While Wallace’ s call to service had a major impact on his education, he does not consider it a setback. He believes the type of learning he was forced to do during his tour prepared him for his remaining years of law school and his career. Wallace was assigned to a North American Aerospace Defense Command control center in Maine. There, he worked at a station where the orders to strike were made. He was surrounded by recently graduated engineers who were quick and deft at their tasks while he found the air missile lessons difficult.
“ The other guys had no problems, but I had to study and learn things I had never heard of before,” says Wallace.“ Nevertheless, I learned how to do it. After I fulfilled my active duty and received an honorable discharge, I enrolled in Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. The first year of law school is difficult. It includes words and thinking that are foreign to most people, and I had been gone for two years. I spent many hours in Tulane’ s law library refreshing all that had escaped me since my first year, but I do not regret being called to active duty. I am honored to aid my country when it calls for me. I graduated from Tulane on May 31, 1965, and by that time, my
Wallace during his first year of law school. Photo by WVU College of Law.
first-year law school classmates from West Virginia had already been practicing law for two years.”
Wallace, now a co-owner and attorney at Wallace Law Offices in Elkins and an adjunct professor of business law at Marshall University, has taken the lessons of service he learned from his time in the military and from his brother to heart in both his career and community.
“ Ever since I was a teenager, I wanted to help create jobs,” he says.“ Friends of mine growing up had fathers who didn’ t have jobs or couldn’ t find jobs in West Virginia, and some of them left the state to find work. In my first position after law school as house counsel for a hotel company in Memphis, TN, I was assigned to find options to buy or build hotels. I set out to find viable locations for the owners to see. Over and over I flew into cities and towns to be met by representatives, but the people who met me knew nothing about what a hotel needed to be viable.
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WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE