Super Lawyers - Maryland 2016

That type of empathy has always served Staton well. “I make a habit of telling my clients one day this case will end,” he says. “It’s either going to end positively or negatively, but when it ends it will be over.

It may be one of the saddest days of your life. Because I remember when my case ended, and it was one of the saddest days of my life.”

His case?

He was the client. And the injured party was his mother.

AN ONLY CHILD WITH AN ORNERY STREAK,

Staton was set straight more than once with
a few swats to the behind. “I remember one
time, my mother was going to spank me,
and so I stuck a Dr. Seuss book down the
back of my pants,” he says. “When she hit
me with her hand, she realized the book was
in there, and so she took the book out and
spanked me with that. And then she made
me read it.”
Staton began working at age 12 with a
paper route, then helped out at Rombro
Brothers clothing factory at 15 before doing
janitorial work with Con Edison power
company in New York. After graduating
from Oberlin College in 1976, he was
accepted to law school; however, he says
the school lost his financial aid application
and he couldn’t afford tuition. He had to
find another way to pay for school.

“So I took a job with the public defender’s office in Baltimore,” he says.

“That was my day job. And I worked at
night for the Hecht Company selling
clothes in the men’s department. I’d hop
on the bus in the morning, get down to the
public defender’s office, and at the end
of the day, get back on the bus and go to
Hecht’s and work until they closed at 9: 30.
Then I would either walk home or take the
bus. I did that for a year.”
After earning a J.D. from the University
of Maryland School of Law in 1980,
Staton was a fellow in the Reginald
Heber Smith Community Lawyer
Fellowship Program, which placed him
with Maryland Legal Aid, a statewide
agency that provides representation for
indigent citizens. His primary duty was
representing people in District Court who
were battling debt collection.

“I was addressing the problems of the
poor, so their problems were not so much
legal in nature as they were financial,”
he says. “It was a great experience for a
young lawyer to have to go to court and
stand on your feet and argue in front of
the judge, and apply the law to the facts
and also argue real life. It was a wonderful
and rewarding experience. And one of
the things I like about my current practice
is that I see a lot of that same type of
people—the indigent who unfortunately
received second-class medicine. They’re
the same folks, just with a different set of
problems.”
But then his family developed its own
set of problems.