Super Lawyers - Alabama 2011

A TRUE
GENTLEMAN
Birmingham civil defense attorney Mike Atchison
believes in treating everyone with dignity

BY NANCY HENDERSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY STAN KAADY

Despite his illustrious career—he’s rescued mega-companies from the brink of financial disaster, defended a major airline after a highly publicized crash, and earned a reputation as one of the leading business litigators in the Southeast—the case Mike Atchison considers his most interesting revolved around, of all things, the “feather sexing” of chickens.

In the late 1980s, a feed-and-seed
company in Des Moines, Iowa, discovered
a way to genetically breed a chicken
whose gender could be determined by
inspecting its feathers the day it hatched.
“You don’t want roosters. All you want
are the girls,” says Atchison, 70, of Burr &
Forman in Birmingham. “Roosters don’t
start exhibiting male characteristics until
about four to six weeks, so you don’t
know for a month, while you’re feeding
all these chickens, that you’re gonna
have to destroy half of them because
they’re roosters.”
Unfortunately, the breakthrough
process wasn’t foolproof. After receiving
a load of chickens and not being able
to tell the boys from the girls, a major
customer sued. Atchison headed
to snowy, bitterly cold Des Moines,
researched the facts and secured a
surprisingly reasonable settlement for
the feed-and-seed supplier that required
no large-sum payment. Says Atchison,
who learned more about egg layers and
roosters than he’d ever imagined, “I had
no idea chickens were so fascinating.”
During his 40-year civil defense
career, Atchison has relied on his
attention to detail, “people instincts”
and strong verbal skills in matters
ranging from employment discrimination
to medical malpractice. A key trait: He
remains calm in the courtroom. “I’m not
a shouter,” he says. “I always try to out-
prepare the other side. … I never look
at my fellow lawyers as enemies. They
represent their client; I represent mine.
But we’re not the issue.”
“If there ever was a true gentleman,
it’s Mike Atchison,” says colleague Ed
Hardin, who joined Burr & Forman in
2008. The two have been friends since
their college fraternity days. “In spite of
the personal consequences or obstacles
or risk of personal ridicule or social
pressures, Mike always does what is right
under the circumstances.”

GROWING UP ON THE EAST SIDE OF
Birmingham, with a Southern drawl so
thick he took speech lessons as a teenager,
Atchison yearned to be a major league
baseball player. But, he says, “I couldn’t
hit a curve ball,” so he set his sights
on becoming a “pipe-smoking, tweed-
wearing” professor and earned a history/
political science degree from Birmingham-
Southern College. But with throngs of
young men enrolling in graduate school
to avoid the Vietnam War draft, there
wouldn’t be enough academic jobs to
go around after graduation, so Atchison
switched gears again.