By Mark Fierro & Justin Velez

Lawyer. Attorney. Officer of the court. Takes a lot of work. Hear a lot of jokes. Not just jokes about ties or haircuts either. Jokes about integrity. Jokes about fitness for trust and credibility in and out of the court.

Sometimes it’s about goals, about what you are going to do with those titles, with the trust that your clients put in you. All of us have points of reference, of looking out on that horizon and saying “ok, what am I going to do with my life, with my hours and not just my billable hours.”

I have heard that one of the most valuable guides you can have in life is to hang with friends who are a bit older, not just for general wisdom, though that’s a big part of it. The idea of hearing what they might have done differently with their last ten years, the last twenty on the job, in their marriage, their families.

Sometimes you hear what you wish you might do with the next twenty. Sometimes what you hear is that you would like to be on the exact same path they went down.

Joe W. Brown is an attorney. Officer of the court. Hail fellow well met. Known locally, nationally actually, as “America’s Best Friend.” I don’t know if there is a place where Brown isn’t known. There is the story that Senator Dick Bryan was on a junket in Mongolia, sitting at a bar, when a yak rancher asked where he was from. Bryan said Las Vegas, Nevada. The Mongolian asked him if he knew Joe Brown.

Just as much as being known, it’s about what the man is known for. And the list is long.

When Brown was young, his parents had older friends named Virginia and Frank Wyatt. Frank passed away, and Virginia was totally lost. Brown’s mother volunteered him as Virginia’s errand boy. Take her here. Take her there. Help her with everything. One day he took her to her lawyer’s office and waited in the waiting room. When Virginia came out, she was visibly relieved. She said, “Oh, he was such a nice man. He’s gonna help me.” Brown thought, I want to be able to do that for people. He had law in his blood. Uncles, grandfather, great-grandfather, all attorneys or judges. His mother spent his childhood telling him she wanted him to be just like his Uncle Tom, a Yale undergraduate, Harvard Law, Navy in World War II. But it was that moment in a waiting room, watching an old woman walk out with her shoulders a little higher and a little less fear in her heart, that showed Brown what a law degree could actually mean to someone.

Former Nevada Governor Bob List, who has known Brown for more than fifty years, tells a story about driving out to Red Rock Canyon by himself one weekend when he was serving as Nevada’s attorney general. It was a dirt road back then. And there, out in the middle of the desert, was Joe Brown with his wife Pam, their boys, and a young kid. The kid’s name was Cornelius Clark. Brown and Pam had gotten involved with the Las Vegas Boys and Girls Club. Their job was to find a young person who needed friendship and support. Brown found Cornelius when he was eight years old. He embraced him. Encouraged him. Took him camping and fishing with his own sons. When Cornelius was about twelve, a TV interviewer asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a lawyer, like Joe. Then the peer pressure hit. Drugs. Jail. Brown went to court and defended him. Cornelius eventually did hard time up in Ely. Brown never walked away. Never gave up on him. They stayed in touch the entire time. Nearly sixty years later, Cornelius Clark says they still get together every year around their birthdays, which fall just days apart. He is sixty-four now. List put it plainly: “I’ve never known anybody with a bigger heart than Joe.”

Look at the careers Brown has shaped by simply putting a name in front of the right person. Former Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury found out that people were congratulating him on seeking a commission seat he never pursued. Brown had quietly put his name in with Governor List. Woodbury served for twenty-eight years. He had no idea Brown was behind it until people started shaking his hand. Nevada Supreme Court Chief Justice Douglas Herndon credits Brown with helping him reach the bench and says Brown inspires the people he helps to find the next generation of good people to serve. Clark County Commissioner April Becker says Brown wrote her law school recommendation letters, her bar admission letters, and once volunteered her for a race she never said she wanted to run. Becker calls him “the father I didn’t have.”

And then there is George Chanos. Chanos was at the Trinidad fight at the MGM Grand, at the bar in Fiama with friends, when in walked Joe Brown. Brown said, “George, I’ve been thinking about you.” Brian Sandoval was resigning as attorney general to take a lifetime appointment as a federal judge, creating a two-year vacancy. Governor Kenny Guinn had asked Brown to find the replacement, and Brown thought Chanos would be great. The next day, Chanos looked at his phone and saw Brown’s name. He answered. Brown said, “Good morning, General.” And it was done.

Skeptics would call that juice. Republican juice. But Brown was able to wave that magic wand because Kenny Guinn, the governor of the state of Nevada at the time, trusted Brown. He trusted his judgment. He agreed with Brown and a good guy got the job. Politics? If Governor Guinn was looking for a good Republican who could run as an incumbent, it didn’t work. Chanos didn’t run for reelection. He won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, 9-0, then decided politics was not for him. He had raised five times as much money as his opponent in the first three months. He had incumbency. He gave all of it back. He sat down with Joe and Pam, took his car keys out of his pocket, put them on the table, and said, “Joe, if you gave me the keys to the governor’s mansion and said you can move in tomorrow, I would say no.” He gave his Republican contributions back and raised money for Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto’s campaign for attorney general. No pushback from Governor Guinn. No heat from Joe W. Brown. Someone else might have taken that personally. Not Brown. Chanos says they are closer today than they have ever been. He calls Brown “like a second father” and says Brown never expected anything in return. “He’s not looking for anything. He’s not looking for any return. Has no expectation of anything other than you kick ass and do a good job.”

Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley recently presented Brown with a key to the city. She said she guards those keys carefully because they need to mean something. Then she said something that is worth repeating here: “If you did not exist, Joe, we would have to invent you.” She said that in all the decades she has known Brown, she has never heard a single negative word about him in the entire community, in the entire state. When asked what she wants her own legacy to be, Berkley answered simply: “I want my legacy to be that I reminded people of Joe Brown.”

When you ask the people closest to Brown what separates him from every other connected attorney in Nevada, the answer is always the same. No angle. No ask. No return expected. Brown himself keeps it simpler than that. “I have immense wealth, not in material things. I have more damn good, dear, deep friends than anyone that I know.”

The clock is running for all of us. When you are younger, it’s not nearly as loud, but it’s ticking for all of us. There is a stack of evidence that attorney Joe W. Brown has been running and helping people for a long, long time, almost as if he always heard that ticking and knew he had to do something with his time. Those attorney jokes won’t stick to Joe W. Brown. He just might very well be America’s Best Friend.

Mark Fierro began his career as a reporter/anchor at KLAS-TV, the CBS television station in Las Vegas. He worked at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He served as communications consultant on IPO road shows on Wall Street. He provided litigation support for the Michael Jackson death trial. He is president of Fierro Communications, Inc., which conducts mock juries and focus groups in addition to public relations and marketing. Fierro is the author of several books including “Road Rage: The Senseless Murder of Tammy Meyers.” He has made numerous appearances on national TV news programs.

Justin Velez is a marketing and public relations professional with more than a decade of experience driving results-driven campaigns and earned media placements for brands across the healthcare, technology, retail, cannabis, hospitality and tribal governance sectors, among others. His expertise spans brand positioning, content strategy, copywriting, digital marketing and creative direction, from full-scale identity systems to multi-platform campaign production. He currently serves as project manager at Fierro Communications, Inc.