Carter Brown grew up on a working 160-acre farm a few miles northeast of Zanesville. His mother and father are third generation farmers who raise certified Angus cattle. His childhood was spent mostly reading, doing chores and figuring out ways to entertain himself.
“I wasn’t shy,” Carter says. “I’d talk a person’s ear off given the opportunity. But a lot of the time, I didn’t have the opportunity because I was busy with my chores and working on the family farm.”
He knows the smell of fresh-cut hay and what it’s like to stack heavy bales on hot summer days. Each year growing up, he raised a steer and a feeder calf for his 4-H project. In the evenings, Carter could usually be found reading some piece of fiction. Even now, he says reading is one of his primary hobbies – among his favorite writers are Dan Brown, John Grisham and Michael Creighton.
It was assumed he and his brothers would go to college. When it was Carter’s turn, he enrolled at Muskingum College. He grew up not knowing what career path he wanted to take and variously considered medicine, journalism and advertising. At Muskingum, he initially pursued a major in business, then switched to marketing and then accounting. Eventually, he graduated majoring in all three. However, his preference was to work in an arena offering more variety and more opportunity to work with people.
He began thinking about law over the space of two internships with Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, where he had a chance to connect with people in the legal department. They told him every day brought a new set of challenges. He liked the sound of that. He was accepted at the Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law and never looked back.
Carter thinks of himself as a people person. He spends his weekends visiting friends, going on spontaneous trips and occasionally just working around the house. He’s happy to be putting down roots in his hometown – and he’s happy to have landed in a firm that so avidly supports Zanesville.
“My final choice came down to SWBW or one of those large corporate firms you read about in the national news. I chose SWBW because I’ll be able to have more of an impact here. In a smaller firm like this, you get to see the whole picture, as opposed to a big firm where many attorneys just get to see the part of the picture they are assigned. Here I knew I could pursue the best result for my clients, instead of pursuing the best result for my boss.”
He joins Stubbins, Watson, Bryan & Witucky as a litigator. “If you’re looking for blood, you should get a bulldog attorney. But if you’re seeking to resolve an issue and achieve a specific outcome, you should look for an attorney who is capable of getting that result. That’s the kind of lawyer I aspire to be, one who listens to his clients and solves their problems.”
