When Steve Cousins was starting out his career as a lawyer at the prestigious St. Louis law firm Armstrong Teasdale, bankruptcy law was a new field. It was 1980, and the bankruptcy code had just been released in 1978. At the time, Cousins thought he would take the traditional path to success for associates at the firm, working in tax law.
“A lot of the white-shoe, silk-stocking law firms looked down upon bankruptcy,” Cousins told The American. “It wasn’t anything appropriate for a major law firm. So we had a big meeting with the partners and they went around the table with all the young associates and said, ‘Who here has an interest in working on a bankruptcy project?’ No one raised their hand.”
Cousins contemplated the idea of getting involved in this new field, with no guarantee of what his future would look like. It was a big risk for him to take as a young, black lawyer from North St. Louis, the first black attorney at the firm. He asked mentors in the field of law about it, lawyers and judges he had met as a student at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL), Yale University, where he earned his BA in 1977, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he earned his J.D. in 1980.
But the decisive advice came from his father, Frank Cousins, the owner of a successful exterminator business. He asked his son three questions.
“Well, Steve, how many people are in the tax department?”
“Five.”
“Well, how many people will be in the bankruptcy department?”
“Me.”
“Who’s the president?”
“Reagan.”
“Well, there goes the inventory,” Frank Cousins said. “By the time he gets through screwing up the economy, you’ll have a lot of work to do.”
“And it was true,” his son recalled many years later. “He screwed up the economy.”
He was also right about his son’s career in bankruptcy law, where he has a national reputation and book of business.
Now, Cousins has been selected by the Missouri Bar Association to receive the 2017 Martin J. Purcell Award. The award recognizes Missouri lawyers who have excelled in legal practice and civic service.
“Throughout his entire career, on a local, regional and national basis, Steve has consistently demonstrated exceptional competency, integrity and civility,” said John Beulick, managing partner at Armstrong Teasdale. “He is a trusted advisor to many of our clients, and is absolutely deserving of this recognition.”
Famous firsts
Cousins’ career is now a long series of “firsts.” In addition to being the first African-American lawyer at Armstrong Teasdale, he was the first African American to lead a department there, the first to make partner, and the first to serve on the firm’s executive board. He was also the first African-American lawyer to be named in the “Best Lawyers in America” list, where he’s now been listed for over 20 years.
“It is historically significant to be the first,” Cousins said. “For me, what drove me was not being the first and trying to prove myself against some sort of presumption, but being a high-quality lawyer, and I was driven to be the best at what I did. Putting a positive spin on it, I was driven by positives rather than by negatives or some kind of effort to rebut.”
In college, he would not stop studying and leave the library until he was the last person there. At Armstrong Teasdale, he was often the lawyer who stayed the latest and clocked the most hours. Practicing bankruptcy law when the field was new gave him another opportunity to be the best.
“It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, so it created a level playing field,” Cousins said. “So the young guys could come out, who were really ambitious, could read that code, study that code, master that code, and not only master it but manipulate it and do creative things with it on behalf of clients.”
It made sense that Cousins’ career path ran counter to tradition. He had started defying traditions when he graduated from law school. Cousins graduated from top-tier East Coast schools, but he did not want to work in that world. He wanted to go back to St. Louis, his hometown, even if that would make it harder to succeed.
“I knew that St. Louis had a poor track record in terms of hiring African-American lawyers,” Cousins said. “I knew that going in, and two of my colleagues at law school said, ‘Why are you going back to St. Louis? It’s a Southern town, there won’t be any opportunities for you.’ I thought that if I could go up East and amass the right opportunities and credentials, it would create an inarguable proposition in terms of entering into one of those major firms.”
So when he was looking for his first job, Cousins didn’t go through the University of Pennsylvania’s placement department to get matched up with job interviews. He went back to St. Louis with no connections and no money and started literally knocking on doors – highly unusual for someone with a law degree seeking work at a large firm.
When he knocked on the door at Armstrong Teasdale, Cousins asked the receptionist if he could speak to the person in charge of hiring. That was attorney Tom Remington, who Cousins describes as “a blue-blood guy from New York who was the right-hand man of Nelson Rockefeller.”
“He got the phone call and said, ‘Who in the hell is asking those kinds of questions?’” Cousins said. “So he said he came just out of curiosity. So he came along and we shook hands and we got along swimmingly. Five interviews later, they made the decision to hire me.”
It was the start of many years litigating major cases at Armstrong Teasdale. Cousins has represented many companies in significant Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, including the Apex/Clark Oil/Copper Mountain case, the largest collection of private companies to ever file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In addition, Cousins led a defense team for former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonse Jackson when he was accused of ethics violations, leading to a three-year long case where Cousins successfully defended Jackson, a fellow North St. Louis resident.
Cousins even helped the NAACP avoid filing for bankruptcy when they experienced financial difficulties, something he said was one of his proudest moments.
Cousins established the Bankruptcy and Financial Restructuring department at Armstrong Teasdale, which he still leads. As a leader, Cousins demands thoroughness, ethics and clarity in his team.
“We can’t cut corners, we can’t misrepresent, we can’t shade,” Cousins said. “You’ve got to speak with clarity and conviction and you’ve got to win a case based on the facts, not on a technicality.”
Civic problem-solver
The Martin J. Purcell Award also recognizes commitment and success outside the courtroom and corner office.
“They go hand in glove, professional excellence and civic excellence,” Cousins said. “They’re both sort of puzzling through problems, to solve what’s ailing the clients or to solve what’s ailing your community.”
In 1997, St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) was having major financial struggles. Cousins, who attended SLPS from first to seventh grade, wanted to help.
“Various members of the corporate community, we were told, had a real disinclination to give them any money, thinking that’s tantamount to throwing good money after bad,” Cousins said. “They had lost a good deal of credibility in the corporate community, and they were struggling in every respect. And so I was approached by some people that said, ‘Look, I think the answer to the problem with St. Louis Public Schools is to have a foundation so they can raise money from the private sector.’”
Cousins and other concerned citizens studied the right approach to creating a charitable foundation for about a year. Ultimately, he founded the St. Louis Public Schools Foundation with co-chair Susan Musgraves. The foundation helps attract corporate donations to the public school system, as well as help shape the schools’ policies and curriculum.
Since his family moved to Normandy when they left the city, Cousins also felt he had a debt to repay to Normandy public schools, so he served on the Board of Education for the Normandy School District. Yale University helped to shape him, so he served on the Board of Governors for the Yale Alumni Association.
Cousins also has served on the board of Children’s Hospital, the St. Louis Art Museum, and Salvation Army, among others. For 13 years, he co-chaired the St. Louis Internship Program (SLIP), which matches low-income high school students with paid internships.
“I want to give back because it’s just the right thing to do,” Cousins said. “It’s not extraordinary. As my father would say, it’s just being decent. Doesn’t have to be fancier than that, just being a decent human being.”
