What's Possible

Benjamin Wilson grew up in the Deep South during the Civil Rights era, where the law was one thing but reality was quite another. Jackson, Mississippi was stringently segregated at the time, and at six years of age, he watched the integration of Arkansas schools on the news. He saw Freedom Riders brave violence to challenge the status quo, and he was twelve when Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist dedicated to integrating the University of Mississippi, was murdered.

In sixth grade, Ben watched James Meredith boldly gain admittance to the University of Mississippi as its first black student. Meredith’s lawyer, Constance Baker Motley, was the first black woman to ever argue a case before the Supreme Court, winning not with physical power, but with something even more remarkable. “In that moment, I learned that powerful didn’t mean big,” Ben reflects today. “It means a different kind of strength—intelligence, courage in one’s convictions, and bravery. I saw lawyers as having the ability to impact their communities and to make change for the better, and I wanted to do that.”

Thanks to the visionary faith of his parents and his own ability to manifest that strength, Ben is now the Managing Principal of Beveridge & Diamond, P.C., the world’s premier environmental law firm. With a hundred lawyers and offices in seven cities, its work spans the globe to address the expansive needs of its clients, and Ben oversees it all.

The firm was launched in 1974 during the Watergate Era, when President Nixon ordered Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to remove Archibald Cox, a Professor at Harvard Law School and the Watergate special prosecutor, from the case. When Richardson refused to do so, the order was passed on to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused. After both men resigned in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Ruckelshaus joined forces with several colleagues to launch Ruckelshaus, Beveridge, Fairbanks, and Diamond, an environmental law firm that would address issues of implementation related to the Clean Water Act, which had passed in the early 1970s.

The firm was a decade old by the time Ben came onboard in 1985 as a contract partner. He had three years to prove himself, and within the first, he had established himself as the busiest lawyer at his level. Ben and his team spent the subsequent decade establishing the firm as the best in environmental law, and now, companies readily identify it as such. “We wanted clients to see us as a firm that knew the substance of environmental law, but could also handle the work of major litigation matters,” Ben explains. “Today, we’ve taken on these challenges for oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, manufacturers, big box stores, and municipalities across the country.”

The decision to name Ben the firm’s Managing Principal in 2008 was the culmination of a lifetime of striving not for what is, but for what’s possible—a dream set by his parents from the day he was born in Indiana. He was only several weeks old when they drove south to Jackson, where his father would earn his PhD and his mother would attain her master’s degree. Both parents taught at Jackson State University, a historically black college where his father coached basketball and assisted with football. As a result, Ben and his three younger brothers grew up immersed in athletics and academia.

“What my parents saw, more than anything else, were opportunities for us that they, themselves, hadn’t had,” Ben remarks. “They knew integration would come, and that we’d have a chance to compete. So the question was, when you’re put on the field, will you be able to play? Are you competitive? They didn’t know where the opportunity would come, or when, or how, but they felt that it would. They had that sense of what was possible.”

Ben’s mother, in particular, was a woman of strong faith who believed that her son could do almost anything. She taught him that, as long as he worked hard and prepared himself for the future, he would have the freedom and capacity to define himself. “She saw the world not as it was, but as it could be,” he affirms.

His mother wasn’t the only one who saw such potential in Ben. As a boy, he attended junior high at an all-black school in his neighborhood, and one of his English teachers, Ms. Tatum, traveled to Connecticut one spring for a Shakespearean play festival. While there, she happened to sit next to the Dean of Admissions for a preparatory school that was looking for African American boys to integrate their institution. “I know just the boy,” she said.

Ben did well on the standardized test required for admission, but the tuition costs were too much for the family’s modest income. Thankfully, the school was able to award him a scholarship for half the tuition cost, and as long as Ben held paying jobs at the school, his parents could afford to cover the rest of the bill. “I’ll never forget the day I left to start my ninth grade year. We had been at a football game, and we had to leave for the airport midway through, which was sacrilege,” he laughs. “I took Southern Airways to Montgomery, Delta to Atlanta, Eastern Airways to LaGuardia, and Allegheny Airlines to Bradley Field. A man picked me up, and I tried to memorize the winding route to the school in case I didn’t like it and wanted to escape.”

Ben arrived a few days early, when only the junior and senior boys were on campus, and thankfully, they were welcoming from the start. The academic terrain, however, was another story. Ben had been the best student at his school in Jackson, but the preparatory school demanded high caliber performance that introduced him to the challenges of critical thinking. “Teachers didn’t just want the answer; they wanted the ‘why’ behind it,” he says. “I remember studying all night for a test and only earning a 75. But I was extremely competitive and didn’t like being second to anyone, so I resolved to fight my way up to the top. I’d size up other students like I’d size up the quarterback on an opposing team.”

Ben’s determined efforts paid off, and in tenth grade, he made the honor roll for the first time. “I couldn’t wait to tell my mother—I knew she’d be so proud of me,” he recalls. “But she died suddenly before I had the chance to give her the news. That’s one of the biggest disappointments of my life.” Despite the tragedy, Ben was committed to working hard—not just academically and athletically, but also in his various summer jobs. The family moved to Nashville soon thereafter, and on his summer vacations home from school, he loaded ice onto boxcars, sold shoes at Sears, and put in hours of hard labor as a roofer. “Those jobs helped me understand why I was working so hard in school,” he remarks.

Ben attended Dartmouth for college and then went on to Harvard Law School where, on the first day of class, he met a striking young woman named Merinda. “I liked her immediately and offered to give her a tour of Cambridge,” he recalls. “It didn’t take her long to realize I knew nothing about Cambridge!” Ben was particularly impressed by her unwavering commitment to her education. When they studied for exams together and he was ready to call it a night, she knew exactly how to motivate him to keep going. “I didn’t know what kinds of challenges life would bring, but I had the sense that they’d be tough, so I wanted a partner that was tough too,” he says. “We got married, and she has been that, and so much more. She’s been supportive every step of the way, and I’m unendingly grateful to have her.”

After law school, Ben took a position at a firm in Atlanta where he launched his career by writing a brief that was indisputably horrible. “It was sent back to me completely marked up in red, and as a result, I was sent to the equivalent of Siberia—the tax department!” he says. “It was the last thing I wanted to do, but since I knew at that point that my writing was poor, I decided to use that time to write articles about things I didn’t know, developing both my skills and knowledge base.”

From the tax-exempt status of private schools, to tax cases in the fifth circuit court, Ben built his proficiency day by day, making his time count for something. By the end of his tenure there, a number of his articles had been published, and his new excellence in writing served him well when the couple moved to Washington and he took a job in the Civil Division Commercial Branch of the Department of Justice, where he wrote prolifically. “Like that situation, most of my defining moments in life have not been as much about successes as they’ve been about failures,” he remarks. “The key was to not accept that failure as a full definition my life or career, but to come back from it a better person with a stronger character.”

While Merinda took a position at Sidley Austin LLP and embarked on an esteemed 25-year career in which she became a litigation partner at the firm, Ben pursued the position at the Department of Justice because he thought it would force him to swim—and he was right. “In my three years there, they taught me to dribble the ball with my head up, so that when I came out, I had court vision and could readily see the whole picture,” he remembers. “I didn’t have to worry about my writing or about trying cases because I had it all down. Instead, I could look at the witness’s face and observe nonverbal communications, paying attention to internal dynamics and politics.”

Next, Ben took a position at a firm and became a partner several years later. It wasn’t long, however, before the firm lost its biggest client, and as there was little work left, he found himself investigating other options. He committed to pursuing innovative ways to bring in business, like finding work for the clients who owed the firm money so they had a means to make payments. He even began finding his own clients, but three weeks after he had secured his first one, his life took a character-defining turn when he fell from a man lift and broke his neck.

At George Washington Hospital, as his consciousness swam in and out, he fought for his life, only to emerge on the other side wondering whether it would be the kind of life he wanted to live. “I made my negotiation with God,” he says. “I said I’d rather be dead than be paralyzed, where I couldn’t be a father to my daughter or a husband to my wife. And to be honest, that realization brought a peace that I had never known before. I wasn’t afraid to die anymore. I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind or stand up to people of authority. In some profound way, I had gained that other kind of strength that had so inspired me as a kid.”

Thirty-six hours later, the swelling had started to go down, and Ben found he could move his legs. Thankful for the ability to still feel pain, he refused morphine and relished the experience. Three weeks later, he was fired from his job at the law firm, but his newfound peace of mind helped as he asked himself the question his mother had taught him to ask with such optimism and faith: What’s possible?

Looking for a job wasn’t easy. He applied to several hundred law firms and wound up with two offers. The first was with a large firm where he wouldn’t need to develop any clients for himself. The second, which paid a yearly salary of $25,000 less, required that he build a practice. “I never wanted to be in a position where I was beholden to someone else—where my destiny rested in the hands of another person,” Ben avows. “Even though I had no idea how to do it, I wanted to have as much latitude as possible to create my own success, so I chose the second offer, which is what brought me to Beveridge & Diamond.”

Despite his prowess in the field of law, Ben’s success at the firm has rested, above all else, on his unparalleled ability to care about people. At the very beginning, he was put on a case with the Port of Oakland because he had met the client at his previous law firm, and it became the firm’s single largest case that year. The next year, during the savings and loan crisis, Ben was put in charge of taking over the McLean Savings and Loan Association because he had also known the client through a connection, and the case again marked the largest that year. “Something like that seems to happen every year,” he remarks. “By pursuing multiple lines of opportunity at once, focusing on who people are as people and taking a genuine interest in them, one out of four people we meet now results in an actual client relationship. Being nice to one person, no matter who that person is, can result in four clients for the firm. By being truly kind and genuine to people and being patient, the worst outcome is that you make a friend, and the best is that you make a friend who brings you work. It’s a winning situation no matter what.”

By developing his business sincerely, methodically, and personably, one step at a time, Ben has helped the firm build its practice profoundly over the years. He first became Managing Principal in 2008, just as the nation was entering the most difficult economic climate since the Great Depression, but his approach to leadership insulated the firm from the worst hardships. “Law firms were dumping people left and right, but we fired no lawyers, instead opting to freeze the salaries of staff and associates and asking partners to take a cut,” he recalls. “There was a sense of collective sacrifice. We made a doomsday budget, and we stuck by it. We diversified our client base substantially. I encouraged a culture of open communication at every level, and I used unifying pronouns as I persuaded the team that we could win and then gave them the tools to do it. We made it through the crisis, and last year was our best year by far, but the best must get better. We’re constantly asking ourselves what’s possible, and how we can provide even greater value to our clients while keeping costs down—even if that means they’re using us less.”

As proud as he is of the team at Beveridge & Diamond, nothing can match the feeling he got when he saw this same determined attitude in his daughter, Rachel, as she played in a basketball game during her senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite making a couple baskets and playing great defense, the team was playing poorly overall, yet when Rachel stood on the sidelines with her water bottle, she caught her father’s eye, flashed him a big smile, and toasted in his direction. When the assistant coach asked her how she could be happy at a time like that, Rachel explained that her father measured players not when things were going well, but when things were difficult. It was her way of telling Ben that, even though things were going poorly, she was playing hard. “When she had every reason to give up, she didn’t,” he says. “If there’s anything I’d impart to my daughter or anyone else, it’s that you can’t quit. You have to stick with it. That’s the essence. That’s how you truly push the limits to find out what’s possible.”

In offering further advice to young people entering the working world today, Ben stresses the importance of faith, especially through the difficult times when one’s character is truly defined. “Whatever it is you believe in, hold it dear,” he says. “It’s not what happens in life, but how you choose to respond to it. Always treat others as you’d have them treat you. Be a real friend and make peace with all those you know. When all else fails, care about other people, because they’ll always remember that.”

For Ben, caring about people extends far beyond the bounds of the home or the workplace. Beyond serving on the board of Dartmouth College, speaking publically about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the legal profession, and doing pro bono work for the Washington Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, he chaired the board of the Healthy Babies Project, an organization dedicated to addressing D.C.’s dismally high infant mortality rate. “D.C. has the highest infant mortality rate of any major American city, and too many high-risk pregnant mothers here struggle with alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,” he explains. “We’ve supported the healthy births of over 7,000 high-risk babies—all children who now have the potential to grow up and make their own difference in the world.”

In large and small ways, Ben’s professional and personal efforts have always been about allowing himself and others to push the limits of what’s possible. “I think that, in life, we’re all trying to figure out our purpose and why we’re here,” he says. “I don’t have all the answers, but it’s important to work on something in life that’s greater than yourself—that goes beyond the daily grind or the status quo and ensures that we leave things better than when we found them.” It’s this kind of vision that allows one to see things not as they are, but as they should be, and not as they could be, but as they will be.

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