2014–15 VSB President
New President Is Willing to Make Noise for the
Legal Profession
by Gordon Hickey
KEVIN E. MARTINGAYLE is a
thoughtful person who prides himself
on preparation, but he has an impulsive
streak too.
He was nearly through with law
school before he even made up his
mind to be a lawyer, he said during a
recent interview, but after thinking it
over, he decided to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps. It was in law school that
he came to another conclusion: “I was
either going to be a courtroom lawyer or
I wasn’t going to be one at all.” Those
decisions — to be a lawyer and, specifically, a trial lawyer — were arrived at
after some serious thought.
On the other side of the Martingayle
ledger is the lifeguard story. He went to
Virginia Beach on Memorial Day weekend in 1988 and was standing outside
the Avamere Hotel on 26th Street when
he “saw some guys running around on
the beach.” He didn’t know what they
were doing, but he wanted to find out.
So he hopped over the railing — wearing
a jacket, tie, and loafers — and ran across
the sand to ask them.
“
We have to continue to beat the drum publicly
and with the members of the general assembly
that we need to have a fully-funded judiciary.”
It was lifeguard tryouts and there
would be another in two weeks. So he
and a friend “packed up our car assuming we’d get jobs,” and drove back to the
beach from Richmond.
10
The first thing they did was tryout
for the lifeguard positions. They got the
jobs and then went looking for a place to
live, which they also found the same day.
That was a good thing, because they had
nowhere to live, no backup plan, and
very little money.
He spent the summer in the lifeguard stand on 26th Street in front of
the now-gone Avamere.
Martingayle went from the beach to
law school at the University of Virginia.
He spent the next summer as a clerk at
Kaufman and Canoles. The second
summer he split between a firm in New
Orleans, Williams Mullen in Richmond,
and back at Kaufman and Canoles.
“At the end of all that I wasn’t even sure
I wanted to be a lawyer. I enjoyed the
people but I wasn’t positive that I really
wanted to do it yet.”
“What reignited my interest, really,
was taking Trial Advocacy,” taught by
Thomas E. Albro. “I thought he was
great. … He had a very intellectual
approach,” Martingayle recalled. “He
seemed somewhat bookish and yet was
VIRGINIA LAWYER | June/July 2014 | Vol. 63
incredibly witty and incisive.” It was
Albro who ignited that goal of being a
courtroom lawyer.
He put off taking the bar exam in
the summer of 1991 for “one last hurrah
on the beach” as a lifeguard. He experienced “being rather poor” that summer.
“I decided to get my act together. And I
knew I was going to get married. I’d
met the girl of my dreams.” He and his
future wife, Elisabeth, got engaged in
November and he took the bar and
passed it in February 1992.
It was his stepfather, a lawyer, who
taught him the value of careful thought
and clear writing.
His former law partner, Moody E.
“Sonny” Stallings Jr., taught him to “have
guts, don’t be afraid of anybody.”
From his current partner, William C.
Bischoff, “I learned the value of thorough
preparation. When he walks in a courtroom you can be guaranteed he’s more
ready than whoever is on the other side.”
And from uncounted judges he
learned “the value of listening and being
calm, because my instinct was to be too
fired up, too argumentative,” he said. “I
still have to remind myself of this.”
Martingayle joined the Virginia
Trial Lawyers Association early in his
career. He served a stint as chair of the
Employment and Civil Rights Law
Section of the association.
He saw that there was an opening
on the VSB Council, but, “I wasn’t sure I
wanted to be on the council.” As the filing
deadline neared he called the bar and
found out no one else was running so he
put in his name. Just before the deadline,
another candidate entered the race.
Martingayle won.
He started serving on a number of
bar committees, including the Standing
Committee on Legal Ethics —“It goes to
the core of what we do.”
www.vsb.org
2014–15 VSB President
Kevin E. Martingayle
Bischoff Martingayle PC
Owner and partner
Education:
Hampden-Sydney College, 1988
(cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa)
University of Virginia School of
Law, 1991
Martingayle’s wife, Elisabeth, and their children, Harrison, Doria, and Jackson, looked on as he was sworn in as
president of the VSB by Supreme Court Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn.
“I was getting more and more interested in what we do at the bar,” he said.
He witnessed the battles over judicial
vacancies and budget issues that occupied Irving Blank during his presidency
in 2010–11. He also noticed there was no
one on the Executive Committee from
east of Interstate 95, a situation he called
“geographically out of whack.” So he got
elected to the executive committee.
There also was the problem of no
judge at all on the Eastern Shore, which
is in Martingayle’s judicial district. “I
became one of the loud people talking
about that,” he said. “This was a call to
arms. Our branch of government was
under attack.” It looked to him as if the
legislative branch of government “was
under the impression they could just
ignore the judicial branch.”
He had thought of the presidency of
the bar as being mainly ceremonial. But
his experiences on the council presented
a very different picture of the job. He
thought about being a leader. And others
suggested he might be president.
Martingayle thinks of the bar president
as a fire extinguisher. “If we run into a
crisis, I think it falls to the president of
the state bar to take the lead,” he said.
The justices of the Supreme Court
of Virginia “have to be very careful about
www.vsb.org
getting in the rough and tumble of a
political fight, and the executive director
… similarly has to be careful. I don’t feel
those kinds of constraints.” However, he
said that it’s important for the president
to be on the same page as the Court and
the executive director.
Martingayle said support for the
judiciary will be a major priority. “We
have to continue to beat the drum publicly and with the members of the general assembly that we need to have a
fully-funded judiciary,” he said. He
knows that when it comes to politics,
those who make the most noise often get
funded, and the judiciary doesn’t make
the most noise. “Those of us who can
yell, should,” he said. “The worst thing
you can do is be silent.”
He is looking forward to some
vigorous debates as president. “I want
very much to get along, but I know
how to deal with it if you don’t want to
get along. We should always try to work
together for the common good of the
citizens. Sometimes that requires
action. … If we don’t do it, we can’t
count on our Supreme Court to make
political arguments. … It’s our job to
make the arguments necessary to protect our profession.”
Virginia State Bar:
2nd District Representative on
Council, two terms
Chair, Better Annual Meeting
Committee
Member, Budget and Finance
Committee
Member, Legal Ethics Committee
VSB Council and Executive
Committee
Other affiliations:
Virginia Bar Association,
Employment Section Council
Virginia Beach Bar Association
Virginia Trial Lawyers Association,
former chair of the Employment
and Civil Rights Law Section
American Bar Association
Federal Bar Association
Community activities:
Founder and event coordinator
of the Allen Stone Braveheart
Memorial Races, which raises
money for the Navy Seal
Foundation, Virginia Beach
Volunteer Rescue Squad, and
Virginia Beach Lifeguard
Association
Family:
Elisabeth and Kevin Martingayle
have three children: Harrison, 16;
Doria, 14; and Jackson, 12.
Martingayle continued on page 14
Vol. 63 | June/July 2014 | VIRGINIA LAWYER
11
2014–15 VSB President
Martingayle continued from page 11
Martingayle is a Richmond native.
He graduated from Collegiate High
School, the same school Seattle Seahawks
quarterback Russell Wilson attended.
“If you gave me three choices — that
Collegiate was going to produce a president of the United States, a chief justice
of the Supreme Court, or a Superbowl
quarterback, I would have definitely
guessed one of the first two.”
Martingayle was born Kevin
Edward Martin. His father, Donald
Martin, a doctor, died of cancer when
Kevin was 5. His mother, Alice, married
John Gayle, a lawyer, when Kevin was
almost 7 and he died of cancer when
Kevin was almost 17 in 1983. “He was
the biggest male influence in my life,”
Martingayle said.
His mother married a third time
when Martingayle was in college, and
that man, like his father and stepfather,
died of cancer in 1986. His mother also
died of cancer in 1993.
“Those experiences are really terrible
to go through but I think they make you
more of what you already are, either
positive or negative,” Martingayle said.
They made him realize, “Time on this
earth is limited. … I want to do what I
can while I’m here, while I can, before
I’m just another footnote in history. I
think that being a lawyer is a great way
to do it.”
He said that if he could pick one
avenue for practicing law, it would be
litigating constitutional cases and then
arguing them on appeal.
After his mother married John
Gayle, she gave Kevin and his sister the
option of choosing a last name. They
settled on Martin-Gayle. Later, when he
and his wife were about to start having
children Kevin was out running one day
when, “I had this epiphany.” MartinGayle was going to be too complicated
for those yet-to-be children, so he took
14
VIRGINIA LAWYER | June/July 2014 | Vol. 63
Martingayle poses with his daughter Doria after placing in the 2013 Run in the Sun 5k at Virginia Beach. His
sons Harrison (shown in inset) and Jackson placed first and third in the 2014 Run in the Sun.
out the hyphen and made the G lowercase. He’s been Martingayle ever since,
with the blessings of the Gayle side of
the family.
The Martingayle children are
Harrison, 16, and Doria, 14, both of
whom attend Princess Anne High School
in Virginia Beach; and Jackson, 12, who
attends Virginia Beach Middle School.
Martingayle’s “chief passion outside of
the law and family events” is the Allen
Stone Braveheart Memorial Races. It’s
an annual event held at Virginia Beach
to raise money for the Navy Seal
Foundation, the Virginia Beach
Volunteer Rescue Squad, and the
Virginia Beach Lifeguard Association.
Martingayle, who has competed in
triathlons and road races since the
1980s, was recruited by the American
Heart Association to organize a runswim-run fundraising event in 1999.
About eighty people entered. He took
first in his age group in the event and
Stone won his age group. But Stone
died later that year during a Seal training exercise.
Stone was described at his memorial
service as “a guy who would give you the
shirt off his back, literally.” When he
heard that, Martingayle thought it would
be a good idea to put Stone’s image on a
shirt and continue the race in his name.
He approached Stone’s brother with the
idea of making the race an annual event.
“We’ve been doing it ever since, and it
got more and more elaborate every year.”
After a few name changes, it settled on
its current name. There are three races: a
run-swim-run, a separate five-kilometer
run, and a kid’s mile. “It is a zero-overhead group. Every check is made out to
whatever organization someone wants
to support.”
“I’m about as passionate about that,
outside of the law, as anything else. I love
coaching too; I’ve served many times as
a volunteer coach for my kids’ teams.”
His children are involved in wrestling
and running.
The next race, which is expected to
draw about 1,000 participants, is at the
beach a month after Martingayle’s
swearing in as the president of the bar.
And the Martingayle family will be out
in full force.
www.vsb.org