Page 17 - NC Triangle Vol 7 No 2

HEADSHOTS AND CORPORATE
Insports, as in the law, McCabe draws on the experience and expertise of
his mentors.
As a young lawyer, McCabe joined the NC
Advocates for Justice. “I’m not smart enough to gure out things by myself. Almost every time I’ve gone on my own way, it has back red on me. I got involved with NCAJ when I was a young lawyer because I wanted to learn to be a better lawyer. e giants of the profession, Doug Abrams, Wade Byrd, Liz Kuniholm and John Edwards were there, and I wanted to be like them. ey were my heroes.”
“ e mistake I made early as a lawyer was that I thought I had to be exactly like my he- roes. I tried to impersonate them. I would take their speech, their mannerisms and their style into the courtroom. And I came across as somebody not being himself. You have so much fear as a younger lawyer; you don’t want to make mistakes. But you don’t want to lose your genuineness and credibility. So now I’m at the point in my practice where I am com- fortable with who I am, and that’s allowed me to be more human in the courtroom.”
PULP FICTION
Every square inch of wall space and shelv- ing in McCabe’s inner o ce is crammed with music and sports memorabilia. A Willie Mays baseball. An album cover signed by Bono. A Mike Tyson autographed boxing glove. And prominently hung on the wall is a signed movie poster from Quentin Tarantino’s highly stylized, L.A. crime romp “Pulp Fiction.” It’s McCabe’s favorite lm. “It’s unreal that some- one could come up with that. It’s genius. How Tarantino told the story. Brilliant.”
It was storytelling that attracted John Mc- Cabe to the law beginning at age 8. “I love be- ing a storyteller and guring out how to tell the story. I wanted to pursue litigation and be in the courtroom. I love the competitiveness and the challenge.”
His rst job a er graduating from Camp- bell Law was as an insurance defense attorney. “I was miserable and not very good at it,” recalled McCabe. He said he was then “res- cued” by a friend who got him a job with a plainti ’s personal injury law rm. McCabe found that personal injury law was right in his
breadbasket.
John McCabe opened his own law rm in
1999. While his personal injury practice en- compasses everything from wrongful deaths
AttorneyAtLawMagazine.com
17