The son of a career Army man, Evans
attended 18 schools in 12 years, bouncing
between his birthplace of Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, and military bases around the
country, with brief stays in France, Germany
and Japan. He ended up attending college
at Northern Arizona University, where he got
a bachelor’s degree in psychology by age 20,
earned his master’s the following year, and
got a law degree from Saint Louis University
in 1978 after a stint working as a mental
health counselor in Las Vegas.
He then moved back to Vegas where, after
overcoming the prejudice of the sitting D.A.
(“He said to me, in a group setting, that he
had had a black law clerk a couple of years
before and that didn’t work out—so he had
no intention of hiring me.”), he landed a job
as chief deputy district attorney. That led to
a post with the U.S. District Attorney’s Office,
first in Las Vegas and then Phoenix.
“By then, I was married with three kids,
and I was trying to figure out how on the
prosecutor’s salary I was going to send three
kids to college,” Evans says. After serving
as corporate counsel for the Arizona Public
Service Co., he landed jobs in some of the city’s
most prestigious firms—litigating at Jones,
Skelton & Hochuli, Quarles & Brady, Greenberg
Traurig, and Gallagher & Kennedy—before
joining Ballard Spahr in 2015.
Evans’ bread and butter is his commercial
litigation practice, where he routinely
defends telemarketing enterprises in
matters of Federal Trade Commission
regulations. Then there’s his white-collar
defense practice. “You know, people who
are accused of stealing with a pen or a
computer, misleading people,” he says.
“Or someone will set up a business where
they’re working across major borders in a
foreign country and not realizing that, in that
culture, their position might be treated as a
government official, and a simple business
dinner may be seen as a bribe.”
His high-profile political clients include
then-state Sen. John Huppenthal, who was
accused of tampering with an opponent’s
election materials. “What John did was,”
Evans says, “someone was placing signs
around the community that were very
negative and not true, and John had taken
down some of the signs. So they had filed
a criminal charge against him, but they
charged him on the wrong statute. The court
dismissed the case.”
“The money
has never
been the
driving force
for me,” Evans
says. “It’s the
individual
who calls,
saying they’re
getting pushed
around. ...
[Helping that
person is] the
role I like to
play. That’s
what I can
deliver.”
Evans is keenly aware of
the example he sets.
“It’s one of the reasons I keep working
well past 65, I guess,” he says. “It’s
important for young people of color to
see someone like me in the legal field to
understand that they can do this. I’ve often
said that every time we lose one of the
older African-American lawyers to death
or retirement, it takes an awful lot out of
the community.”
Brian Booker, a partner at Gordon
& Rees who’s known Evans since they
worked together at Streich Lang about 20
years ago, puts it this way: “I can say with
assurance that, had it not been for Booker
and the other great mentors I’ve had, I
would not have enjoyed the career that I
have. It is especially important to have an
African-American mentor, because it just
lets you know that it can be done, and it
can be done well and at a very high level in
a community where, frankly, you don’t see
a lot of that.”
Evans, a veteran of the civil rights
movement who marched with the Rev.
Ralph Abernathy shortly after his college
days, understands the frustrations Black
Lives Matter protestors feel with the criminal
justice system. But he urges young people
to get involved in that system—starting with
jury duty, which he says “the brightest of our
people avoid.”
“You have to take these issues and
battle them in the arenas where they really
need to be fought,” he says. “As opposed
to just doing so in the press—which is a
good thing, you have to have people bring
attention to those issues. But somebody
needs to do the grind-it-out work.”
That Evans does, even with his deceptively
soft voice and gentlemanly demeanor.
“Don’t let the smile and the gentle
nature fool you,” adds Brian Booker. “He is
a very nice man, and that’s genuine. But the
man is an assassin when it comes to trial
work. Anyone who mistakes his soft-spoken
nature for a lack of tenacity is always in for
a surprise.”
