Meridian lawyer Bill Ready Jr., longtime user of the "Pit Bull in a Suit" brand, faces a bit of flashy competition from Tupelo-based "Mama Justice. Photo by Coleman Warner

My father spent most of his career as a lawyer facing a state prohibition on advertising legal services, be they in the realm of personal injury claims, divorce or criminal defense. If he were still with us today, daddy would be amused by a giant billboard overlooking a frontage road and Interstate 20/59, close to a small Meridian retail center.

 

Featuring the face and all-business expression of a woman in a blue dress, the billboard features the words “SERIOUS INJURY” and “MAMA JUSTICE,” next to a shiny gold dollar symbol and the phone number of this particular lawyer, Missy Wigginton.

 

The billboard is part of a regional campaign by the Tupelo-based Mama Justice MW Law Firm, which has satellite offices in Jackson, Columbus and Southaven – and wouldn’t mind collecting additional clients from our area. Welcome to the realm of flashy, often-entertaining lawyer branding, a practice made possible by a shift a couple of decades ago in regulations governing courthouse warriors.

 

But if Wigginton and her Mama Justice firm are looking for personal-injury business in Meridian, the punchy marketing faces an entrenched local rival in Bill Ready Jr., who keeps an office on Fifth Street, near the old Lauderdale County courthouse.

 

Ready’s brand is “Pit Bull in a Suit,” and his website says, “After 45 years of helping people, I don’t give up!”

 

Such pitches are common in many places – one billboard that comes to mind, in New Orleans, proclaims “After the Wrecker Call Hecker!” But this sort of marketing makes Ready something of an outlier in the Meridian legal community.

 

This, he doesn’t mind at all.

 

“You want to do something that’s kind of catchy and burns into people’s memory,” Ready told me. “It goes along with my style and my persona.” While Ready takes care to be polite and approachable around town, that can end abruptly when he’s representing a client.

 

Ready spent many years practicing law with his father, Bill Ready Sr., a combative and colorful figure well known from often-dangerous work on civil rights cases several decades ago. Bill Jr. no doubt inherited some of his father’s aggressive traits, and the “Pit Bull in a Suit” brand stemmed from his own courtroom exploits.

 

More than once, after a cross-examination or some other proceeding, some associate would remark, as they left the courthouse, “Good Lord, Bill, you ain’t nothing but a pit bull in a suit! When you get on something, you get on it!” When he’s representing someone in a desperate circumstance, Ready, now a solo practitioner, wants them to know that he’s not one to back down.

 

The suited guard-dog brand, for Bill Jr., came into play more than a decade ago when he was brainstorming with wife Ginger and a friend from the marketing field, Virginia Case. Together they decided, why not use the edgy nickname applied to Bill after his courtroom skirmishes? A “Call the Pitbull” ad fashioned by WTOK TV attracted notice in 2014, earning recognition from the National Association of Broadcasters.

 

It’s all fodder for documenting legacies of one of Meridian’s notable lawyering families. And as for the high-profile pitch by the far bigger Mama Justice firm (which has a staff of more than 50), Ready seems unfazed by the new competition. “If she thinks she can do a better job and have a better reputation,” he says, “let her come on.”

 

Warner is a veteran journalist and cultural historian, and can be contacted at legacypress.warner@gmail.com.