Author Brooks Eason Pens Humorous Memoir of his Life in the Law

WordCrafts Press and author Brooks Eason are celebrating the release of his new Amazon.com bestseller, Trigger Warning: Tales from a Life in the Law, which debuted at Number 14 on the online retailers Hot New Releases chart in its Lawyer and Judge Biography category, and at Number 55 Hot New Releases in the Lawyers and Criminals Humor category. The memoir is filled with stories from the time when Brooks Eason decided to go to law school until he settled his last big case and decided he might just be retired.

“I grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and decided to become a lawyer because I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor. That’s about all there was to it,” Brooks explains. “I went to law school at Duke, then returned to my home state, where I clerked for a federal judge and spent the next forty years in private practice in Jackson.”

Along the way, Brooks collected many stories. He told them over and over, and now he’s written them. Some of them—for example, the times when his ex-wife decided to give raisins to trick-or-treaters at Halloween and when his colleague tried to order pancakes at Waffle House—have nothing to do with the law. But Brooks likes the stories, and it’s his book, so you get what you get. Most of the stories are funny, but some are serious, and one is tragic. Brooks hopes they’re all entertaining.

“The title of the book is Trigger Warning because some of the stories are crude and politically incorrect,” Brooks declares, “especially the ones about sexual harassment cases I defended in the years before workplace Lotharios wised up and became more subtle. I could have watered them down and cleaned them up, but I chose instead to write them exactly as they happened, at least to the best of my recollection.”

But one proviso needs to be added. Brooks says he changed some names, sometimes to protect the innocent but more often to protect the dishonest, obnoxious, and incompetent. In his long career in the law, Brooks had the misfortune of having to deal with lawyers who were all three. He chose Dick as the alias for some of them. You be the judge.

From the Book

I sat down on our screened porch and typed the first words of this book in May 2023, two months before my sixty-sixth birthday. After practicing law for four decades, I was thinking I might be retired, but I wasn’t sure.

Discerning readers might wonder how that could be. How could a man with a post-graduate degree and a lifetime of experience not know if he’s retired? But it was complicated. I still had an office and a title, senior counsel at Watkins & Eager, the law firm in Jackson, Mississippi, where I “worked,” and I remained on call for my biggest and best client, Ingalls Shipbuilding on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But the phone hadn’t rung in a while, I hardly ever went to the office, and I hadn’t billed a single minute all year.

But I wasn’t idle, at least not 24/7. I walked four miles every morning with my dog Junior, and I had just completed the manuscript for what would be my fifth book, The Scoutmaster, a biography of my extraordinary father. While I waited for my publisher to turn the manuscript into a book, I decided to start writing what I hoped would become my sixth book. If you’re reading this, it did.

As an aside, Junior became Junior because his name was Brooks in the shelter from which we adopted him. I’d never heard of a dog named Brooks and decided adopting him was a must. But changing his name was also a must. If my beautiful wife Carrie had ever said, “Come over here, Brooks, let me give you some loving,” it would have broken my heart to get my hopes up only to realize she was talking to the dog.

Brooks Eason, as of the publication date, is pretty sure he’s retired from his life in the law. He lives in Madison, Mississippi, with his wife Carrie, three rescue dogs, and a magnificent orange tabby cat named the Count. Brooks has three children and five grandchildren, only one of whom (so far) is taller than he is. In their spare time, Brooks and Carrie walk the dogs, host house concerts, and dance in the kitchen. Brooks can be found on his screened porch, at brookseason.com, and on Facebook and Instagram. Trigger Warning is his sixth book. You can order an inscribed copy at brookseason.com.