At seven feet tall, Steve Parsons is hard to miss. 

The height is one thing but it’s the big brain, the otherworldly recall, that makes clients and fellow attorneys stand up and listen to Steve Parsons.

Quick disclaimer: Parsons has been a dear friend since The Ramones were topping the charts. On one occasion in a bar 40 years ago he picked me up (I’m only 6 feet tall), turned me upside down and shook me for change to buy the next round of drinks.

Somehow, Steve Parsons has always been ahead of the curve. He was out of high school at 16. Graduated college at 20, graduated from law school at the age of 23.

Parsons’ real first break came as a second-year law student when he was completely shut out of California firms as “bad timing” for a clerkship. 

However, that rejection resulted in landing his first job as a clerk in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Nevada under the wing of DeVoe Heaton. 

It was a great time to be a lawyer in Las Vegas. Lots of mob guys here. Lots of corruption in and around government.

It was the time of Watergate and the entire nation followed and debated the daily televised proceedings more closely than any Super Bowl. It was the courts, the profession of law that held the rulebook on whether the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, would be forced from office in disgrace.

As part of the local angle on that national story, Heaton assigned young Parsons to conduct an initial face off with Robert Maheu, the right hand man of the ultimate power player of Las Vegas, billionaire Howard Hughes. 

Parsons would sit face-to-face with Maheu to determine whether or not Maheu might choose to become a cooperating witness against Hughes and discuss Hughes’ involvement with Richard Nixon and his political machine aptly named CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President. You can’t make this stuff up. Might he be able to shed any light on the activities of the group known as “The White House Plumbers,” the gang of professional burglars that broke into the Watergate Hotel where the Democratic National Committee was housed?

“So I sat down with Robert Maheu and his attorney Mort Galane,” Parsons said in a recent wide-ranging interview. (At the ripe old of age of 22 Parsons was laying down the law to the right hand man of one of the wealthiest, most powerful players of his day.) “And the premise is that I’m going to bargain for Maheu not being indicted. In fact, I didn’t know shit from Shinola.”

As might be expected, Hughes had friends — big, important friends who might have something to say about this plan. Imagine your reaction, a newbie at the U.S Attorney’s office, when there is a phone call from the White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, a former four star general, pointedly demanding you to back the “F” off. Parsons’ answer at age 22 sounds an awful lot like the answer that Parsons would give today.

“In fact, twice that I recall, and I think there was a third time, I took calls from Alexander Haig, who was Nixon’s chief of staff, because they were adamant to try to direct the U.S. Attorney Heaton, not to indict,” Parsons said. “My research had indicated that while Heaton served at the pleasure of the president, the president didn’t have any authority direct the U.S. attorney what to do independently. So in my best falsetto voice, I’d said general, we’re not going to follow your directive.”

Wrong answer. 

“There was a follow-up call. So they did everything they could to try to badger us and Department of Justice faxed a proposed indictment that they would agree to. The phone rang and I answered and it was the deputy attorney general asking if I had seen the indictment? Yes. ‘And what do you intend to do with it?’ Shred it.”

Just imagine how much fun Parsons would have when he was no longer a second summer law clerk and had actually become a licensed attorney.

By 23 he was an assistant chief deputy district attorney and by age 25 was a chief in the DA’s office with a reputation as a sharpshooter for then-Clark County District Attorney George Holt, handling some of the office’s highest profile prosecutions.

Longtime attorney Dominic Gentile has known and worked with Parsons for decades and has a special appreciation for the big man’s encyclopedic knowledge of the law.

“He is a lawyer who really, really understands the courtroom from every quarter of it,” Gentile told Vegas Legal. “Steve has been at the vanguard of some rare areas of civility, such as bad faith claims against insurance companies who denied the benefits to their customers in bad faith. Steve has probably represented more people successfully against insurance companies, directly against insurance companies than any other lawyer that I know. Steve is thorough to a point of pain — he really, really is that kind of a guy.”

The author has watched Parsons and Gentile analyze a case together and it is something to behold. Said Gentile: “Steve’s a litigator. If there’s three or four lawyers talking about something, Steve is going to be the guy that will be leading the discussion. He is a good listener, he will see the parts that are missing and he can lead the discussion in those directions. So I would say it’s his inherent leadership character trait that sets him apart. It’s respect. It’s respect for the man’s clearly above average superior intellect.”

Though Parson’s denies it, those who have known him over the years comment on the fact that he has demonstrated a preternatural memory on any portion of the law he has argued no matter how obscure.

“There is no doubt that he has that gift,” Gentile saids. “Ironically, the person who doesn’t understand that he has that gift is himself. Steve considers himself just to be a person. Everybody’s just a person, but Steve is a gifted person and that’s what makes him different. There’s no question about it. Steve’s got a brain like a computer. What’s contained in it is not always at the forefront, but he retrieves it in a nanosecond. No experience is lost with Parsons.”

Longtime Las Vegas litigator Terry Coffing has known Parsons for decades. He has seen the lights instantly switch on when an arcane point of law is contested.

“Not only has Steve proven that with his accomplishments in so many different areas of the law throughout his career, but if you ask him a question about almost anything having to do with the law, you’d be surprised at his ability to answer with an impressive depth of knowledge,” Coffing said. “It’s like the information is right there below the surface in his mind, and he has this ability to access it almost instantaneously, maybe more so than anyone I know. 

“His memory is probably second to none. I was working with him one time on a case, and just in the course of normal discussion, he suddenly came up with this great piece of information, from another case from 20 years before, which ended up making an enormous difference in our approach to the case we were working on. Steve is and always has been a real lawyer’s lawyer. Other lawyers go to him for advice, for insight.”

And there is that height thing. Parsons insists he is not precisely as tall as he once was. The thing is you have to be at least 7-foot-1s to notice it. 

Said Coffing, “The thing about Steve is his commanding presence in the room, in any room that he happens to be in. Being physically large, and he has that booming baritone voice, and you just know that at some point he’s going to take over the room — but I mean that in the best possible way.”

High praise for someone who was certain they were never going to make it out of law school. Parsons’ fallback career? He had a detailed plan to sell his classmates life insurance after he had washed out.