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Francis H. Hare, Jr.

Francis H. Hare, Jr.
Status: Deceased

(1936 - 2019)

Brother Hare fervently believed his father was the best lawyer he ever knew. It would be equally true to believe that Brother was the best lawyer his father ever knew.

A tireless worker most of his life, Brother was double-promoted twice during high school. He was the youngest student in law school his second year at UVA where he was a member of the same legal fraternity as Ted Kennedy (which made Brother the frequent recipient of Charlottesville Society party invitations and 'oh-by-the-way, do you think Ted can make it too?').

Brother was passionate about the law where it impacted on the protection of consumers from dangerous products. During the 1960s, he successfully represented numerous crash victims of defective helicopter designs. A pilot stationed at the Anniston Army Depot once told Brother that he and his fellow pilots had his name and number taped inside their lockers.

In the early 1970s Brother tried, to completion, the first lawsuit against the Pinto which Ford Motors sold knowing its gas tank had ruptured repeatedly during rear-end-crash tests, some as low as 15 mph. He was later hired as a primary consultant on the landmark 1978 Pinto case (Grimshaw v. Ford) which resulted in the largest initial monetary verdict for a products liability lawsuit in history, to that point.

Brothers experience in holding Ford accountable for its willful neglect of consumer safety, particularly the company's persistent efforts to bury and/or destroy information it was legally obligated to disclose, inspired him to create the Attorneys Information Exchange Group (AIEG) in the early 1980s.

Away from the office, Brother was an avid fan of mysteries print, film, and televised. His knowledge of mystery books and authors was literally encyclopedic. One of his great personal projects after retiring was the compilation of an exhaustive catalog on the topic, one which employed daggers, rather than stars, for a rating system.

Brother was famous for his sense of humor and skill in telling stories, nearly all of which became better and more awe-inspiring with each retelling. According to those who knew him best, Brother could be accurately and fondly described as the single greatest exaggerator in the history of humanity.
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