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The Louisiana Supreme Court might have taken away E’s law license, but they haven’t gotten rid of the E brand.

The newly disbarred E Eric Guirard, who has made a name for himself … well … making a name for himself, is taking the business strategy that made him Baton Rouge’s most famous attorney and starting a new career in the medical field.

Coming soon to a commercial near you: E Eric Guirard Medical Centers.

Once again, the 50-year-old Guirard will play spokesmodel—this time not for a personal injury law firm, but for a personal injury treatment center, a one-stop shop of sorts [chiropractor, doctor, pain management and orthopedist] for accident victims.

Outlandish, perhaps, but not so much when you consider this average law student’s marketing savvy built a multimillion-dollar legal empire with 18 lawyers, 50 paraprofessionals and 30,000 clients that was poised to go statewide and then regional.

For Guirard, who named his children Eason Eric and Eden Eric [both E Eric] in hopes they might one day have taken over the law firm, it really is all about the brand.

“More than anything else, we’ve built a brand, and that brand has value even beyond the legal field,” he says. “I can certainly parlay that brand into something else. I’ll do something else, and I’ll be successful at it.”

It starts with a brand

That brand is something Guirard started building long before he envisioned a law firm.

Mike Barnett, CEO of the Barnett Company, has known Guirard since the seventh grade at Our Lady of Mercy. At Catholic High School—where Guirard picked up his one-letter nickname—Barnett remembers Guirard made school announcements and also announced basketball games, and even ran for class president [he was beaten by Rudy Aguilar]. He eventually became president of the Diocesan Catholic Youth Organization, where he frequently spoke before large groups.

“He liked being at the forefront. He was always in the limelight,” Barnett says. “He was visible. Always visible. That’s his nature.”

At LSU, he majored in broadcast journalism and political science. It was around this time that Guirard earned some notoriety as one of former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown’s so-called Front Row Lunatics. Guirard was about 14 when LSU hired Brown, and Guirard soon became a basketball fanatic. At age 18, he started a Sunday night league that continues even today. Two years ago, he dropped $17,500 to attend Michael Jordan’s adult basketball camp in Las Vegas.

“Dale brought a whole different atmosphere to basketball,” Guirard says. “He talked about motivation, optimism, life and all kinds of things. He just captivated not only the school and the city, but me. I became a huge fan, not just of Dale, but basketball in general. He just ignited a fire in me. So much so that when I got to LSU, I spent more time waiting in line for basketball tickets than I did studying.”

In 1981, then-senior Guirard penned Tigers to the Top, the theme song for the men’s basketball team—led by senior starters Ethan Martin, Rudy Macklin and Greg Cook—that advanced to the Final Four in Philadelphia and finished 31-5.

After college, Guirard toyed with the idea of being a stand-up comedian. For a while, he went on the road as Cajun E, performing in nightclubs across the South. It didn’t work out.

That’s when he decided to “fall back” on law school.

Neither of Guirard’s parents were college graduates, but they had high hopes for their son. His father started Mid-South Door Co. in the early 1960s; his mother went to college for several semesters.

“I first went to law school for lack of a better thing to do, to make my parents happy,” he says. “I always thought about doing the law when I was younger, but it was just kind of in the back of my mind. My parents just wanted me to do something; they wanted me to be a success and be happy, and they just knew it would be something more related to an educated field.”

He first went to work for the now-failed Champion Insurance Co., and four years later, joined New Orleans personal injury lawyer Morris Bart as an associate attorney in the Baton Rouge office.

The ‘E Guarantee’

In 1994, Guirard decided to go into practice for himself. He hooked up with Tommy Pittenger, whom he knew through mutual friends from his high-school days.

They were curious partners, these polar opposites. Guirard loved the spotlight; Pittenger loathed it. Guirard was the eternal optimist; Pittenger typically saw the glass from a half-empty perspective.

But they shared the same philosophy for running a law firm like a business. Expanding on the Morris Bart model, they made customer service a priority. With the E Guarantee, they made customers 10 promises, including regular updates, assistance with medical care and car repairs and more money than their lawyer.

“We came up with specific things we knew all clients wanted in their cases, and we built it around that,” Guirard says. “We knew that if we made a connection with the public, we couldn’t help but be a success.”

They knew from basic marketing principles that a firm with one face and one name would attract more attention. One with a single letter would be even catchier.

E GUARANTEES: E Eric Guirard’s marketing savvy built a multimillion-dollar empire with 18 lawyers, 50 paraprofessionals and 30,000 clients.

On July 4, 1994, they opened a 2,000-square-foot cinderblock office on Main Street, just the two of them and their secretaries.

It was the beginning of their demise.

Almost immediately, the firm initiated its ubiquitous advertising campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court had already declared that attorneys had the right to advertise their services. Guirard took that to the extreme, melding his love of humor, on-screen presence and E Guarantee. He plastered the E everywhere he could—on Frisbees, on magnets, on pens, on T-shirts and even on the side of a truck dispatched to do litter duty in Baton Rouge neighborhoods.

That aspect of their business has never gone over well with traditional Baton Rouge lawyers, whom Guirard refers to as “the white-powdered-wig crowd.”

“I always thought it was crazy to have a referral system where you’re relying on Aunt Nessy’s neighbor’s postman’s baker to send you a case is somehow superior to you getting on television, letting people see you and telling what you can offer as a service in the legal world,” Guirard says. “Why is that inferior? I get on television, I tell people to call me and they do.”

Lawyer David Bateman, who once shared office space with Guirard, admires his colleague’s willingness to endure harsh criticism about his business practices.

“Eric had a very clear vision of how he wanted to start the firm and run the firm,” he says. “They took a lot of criticism from other lawyers, but he and Tommy stuck with it.”

In two years, the firm grew big enough to hire additional help. Guirard again looked to Morris Bart [and other law firms], whom he says used case managers to handle clients—a practice the New Orleans attorney stopped in the mid- to late 1990s.

But while Bart paid case managers a small salary plus a percentage of legal fees, the Guirard firm paid them strictly from the latter.

The case managers were typically former insurance adjustors. Guirard insists an attorney communicated with clients and insurance adjustors, signed off on all forms—including demands—and negotiated the cases.

In 1999, a New Orleans client filed a complaint against the Guirard firm with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel. Although that matter proved unfounded, it opened the door for an all-out investigation into the firm’s policies and procedures.

Changing their ways

In 2001, Guirard and Pittenger changed their ways. They stopped using case managers per se, and ended the practice of paying nonlawyer employees a percentage of the legal fees. But their good-faith actions came with no guarantee.

Meanwhile, the firm was increasingly successful. In 2000, the partners spent $1.2 million building a 10,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance building that included a display of much of Guirard’s memorabilia from his days at LSU, copies of the raps he’s written and even an assortment of E-shirts, as they are, of course, dubbed. The room was the E-seum.

Guirard remained a high-profile figure in LSU basketball, sitting courtside at the end of the LSU bench in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

He waged a very public protest against former coach John Brady, at first wearing black to the games and writing an editorial in The Advocate entitled “Flush Brady.” He eventually quit going to the games altogether, opting instead for the women’s team. In 2005, he penned a sequel to Tigers to the Top as the Lady Tigers advanced to the Final Four in Indianapolis and finished 31-3.

‘E’ For EFFORT: E Eric Guirard and his law partner, Tommy Pittenger, spent $1.2 million on a 10,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance building that included an assortment of E-themed products.

But Guirard’s legal problems hadn’t gone away. In February 2004, Chief Disciplinary Counsel Charles Plattsmier filed formal charges against the lawyers. He offered the two what’s known as a Consent Discipline Package—essentially a plea bargain. They agreed to disband the case-manager system, attend Ethics School and submit to monitoring in exchange for an 18-month deferred suspension. At one point, they invited Plattsmier in to ensure the firm was complying.

In 2007, the deal fell through. Plattsmier says there was never any determination the firm was in compliance with ethics rules, nor any suggestion that they might avoid punishment. Ethics violations have no statute of limitations.

“Their hope was that demonstration of reformation would ultimately be enough to convince the Louisiana Supreme Court of their case, but there was never any suggestion that if they reformed their practice there would be no disciplinary consequences,” Plattsmier says. “Their business model had violated the ethics rules for quite some time.”

A year later, the Disciplinary Board recommended permanent disbarment, also accusing Guirard and Pittenger of illegal solicitation of clients. The next stop was the Supreme Court.

That decision came down earlier this month. The Supreme Court rejected the allegation of illegal solicitation, but was nonetheless harsh in its ruling. At the center of their decision: The firm’s “business first” model. The justices cited “a dishonest or selfish motive, a pattern of misconduct and substantial experience in the practice of law” as the reason for their decision.

Though Guirard and Pittenger made provisions for such a ruling by incorporating the names of Chad Dudley and Steven DeBosier into the firm’s moniker, they weren’t emotionally prepared for the prospect of disbarment. Guirard, for one, thought they had convinced the Supreme Court that such a punishment was too harsh for the deed.

“I thought there would be some sort of sharp suspension, but I had no idea or inkling there would ever be a disbarment,” he says. “It’s like being clobbered in an alley when you don’t think there’s anyone there.”

For Guirard, it comes during a particularly difficult period of his life. He’s newly divorced, and trying to cope with the reality of not seeing his children every day. His mother Edwina died earlier this year, and his father Gerald was recently committed to a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s.

Dale Brown has already called, reminding him that it’s not his IQ that counts in life, but his FQ [failure quotient]: How many times he can get himself off the floor and get back in the ring and keep fighting. The partners and their lawyers are preparing to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision and possibly file a federal lawsuit challenging constitutional issues, but Guirard is pragmatic enough to know this might be it.

Barnett is worried about how this might affect his friend. “If you want to kill somebody, you give them small doses of arsenic over along period, gradually increasing it,” he says. “What the legal profession did to Eric is kill him one drop at a time for a decade. I can tell you he’s devastated, angry, worried, embarrassed and frustrated. All of those things unfortunately will change your personality if you’re not very, very careful. Hopefully, he won’t have that problem.”

But Guirard has no intention of letting this stop him. For one thing, he doesn’t have the luxury of retiring. “I’ve got two young children—a seven year old and a five year old. I have an ex-wife and a girlfriend. I’ve got two houses and cars. I need to work.”

More to come?

It used to be, Guirard muses, that the Office of Disciplinary Counsel only went after the lawyers who were lying, cheating and stealing, what he terms the low-hanging fruit. Now he’s convinced it’s venturing into grayer areas.

And he’s right.

When Guirard and Pittenger started practicing law together, the average number of prosecutions was 30 or 40 per year. Now it’s 120 to 150. And 45% of the time, the Supreme Court decides to permanently disbar lawyers, or the lawyers end up permanently resigning.

The Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board’s budget is now $4 million; the annual assessments that lawyers pay have risen from $45 in 1996 to $235 today. When Plattsmier took over, the ODC had three lawyers, a chief disciplinary counsel and one investigator for 17,000 lawyers. Today, it has 13 lawyers and five professional investigators.

Guirard and Pittenger might not be the only ones to take a fall for letting nonlawyers do the kind work reserved for lawyers.

“Unfortunately, the practices that we discovered and investigated and prosecuted in the case of Mr. Guirard and Mr. Pittenger appear in other matters under investigation and are scheduled to be prosecuted by this office in the days ahead,” Plattsmier says. “I don’t want to leave you with the suggestion that we are satisfied this was the only instance where this sort of behavior occurred, and we have every intention of pursuing it.”

THE E TIMELINE

1981 - E Eric Guirard graduates from LSU with a double major in broadcast journalism and political science

1987 - Guirard receives a law degree from LSU and goes to work as an insurance defense lawyer

1991 - He goes to work for New Orleans personal injury lawyer Morris Bart as an associate attorney in the Baton Rouge office

1994 - He and Tommy Pittenger establish E Eric Guirard Injury Lawyers; the firm has two lawyers and two secretaries and operates from a 2,000-square-foot cinderblock office on Main Street

1996 - The firm begins to hire case managers and pays them a straight percentage of the fees generated by the files they work on in a given pay period

2000 - The Office of Disciplinary Council begins to investigate the firm

2001 - Guirard and Pittenger begin paying their case managers straight salaries and increase lawyer supervision

2004 - In February, the Office of Disciplinary Counsel files formal charges against the two lawyers; in September, ODC presents its case to a Hearing Committee, then later offers a Consent Discipline [plea bargain], in which Guirard and Pittenger agree to admit to and correct violations, attend Ethics School and have their firm monitored in exchange for an 18-month deferred suspension

2007 - Chief Disciplinary Counsel Chuck Plattsmier declines to present the Consent Discipline package to the Supreme Court, and the Hearing Committee reconvenes

2008 - Hearing Committee recommends Guirard and Pittenger be suspended for one year and one day; in November, however, the Disciplinary Board recommends permanent disbarment

2009 - The Louisiana Supreme Court hears arguments in March, and in early May orders the two disbarred