Remembering a Client
Our office was deeply saddened this week to learn about the death of Darryll Walter Bolduc, a former client and someone whose fearless efforts to take on powerful interests we truly admired.
Our relationship with Darryll began nearly four years ago when he was a newly minted attorney about to hang out his first shingle in Charlotte, NC. The law practice was a second career for him; as Darryll openly discussed, he decided to go to law school only after being blackballed from the securities industry for being a whistleblower.
A former bond trader with NationsBank, a predecessor to Bank of America, Darryll in 1995 filed a wrongful-termination suit against NationsBank claiming he was fired after warning company executives about accounting irregularities devised to hide trading losses. NationsBank initially claimed the standard he-wasn’t-a-team-player disparagement and blamed his “overly aggressive trading style,” but soon after The Wall Street Journal got wind of his lawsuit the company settled with him for more than $500,000.
Fighting his wrongful termination taught Darryll a painful lesson about the perils of taking on North Carolina’s Establishment. Virtually all of the employment attorneys he approached shunned his case as they were on retainer or had business dealings with either NationsBank or one of the other major financial services companies in the area. As Fortune Small Business wrote, Charlotte is “a town where connections between banks and lawyers run deep.” Although he garnered a lucrative settlement, he was unable to land a comparable bond trading job like the one he had had at NationsBank. He had been labeled a troublemaker.
Recognizing there was a void of top-flight employment attorneys willing to take on the small but extremely powerful coterie of Charlotte-area companies, Darryll attended law school and set up shop as a securities arbitration and employment law attorney. It didn’t take him long before he made his presence known: Within two years he was working on cases against many of the big corporate names in Charlotte, including Bank of America, Wachovia, TIAA-CREF, Philip Morris, and NASCAR. By design, many of his cases involved whistleblowers.
Darryll couldn’t afford to retain a New York City PR firm for an extended period, but we kept in touch with him over the years and helped him out whenever we could. Many of his clients were individuals from low or middle rungs of corporate ladders who had been made scapegoats for others’ blunders and transgressions, or like Darryll, had dared to sound warning alarms about perceived wrongdoing by their bosses.
Darryll never let the emotional aspects of his cases cloud his legal judgment and, despite representing the corporate downtrodden, he never held himself out to be a crusader. Indeed, he was soft spoken, genteel, and extremely gracious. Those who know him on a more personal level have since talked about his kindness, his sense of humor, his optimism and his hands that seemed forever extended to someone in need. We regret that we never had an opportunity to meet Darryll in person. His kind doesn’t come around often.
Darryll called us a few weeks ago to let us know the Charlotte Observer was planning a feature on him and that we might be getting a call from a reporter. Tragically, the story they ran was his obituary.
Darryll Walter Bolduc was only 47 when he died. Our most heartfelt sympathies go out to his family, friends, colleagues, and clients.