C. Arthur “Brother” Rutter III, L’94, spent the first years of his legal career chasing a dream of being a prominent, nationally recognized litigator.

After graduating from Richmond Law, he joined his father’s personal injury law firm. Rutter capitalized on the firm’s location in Hampton Roads and narrowed his focus to railroad and maritime law, which led him to fight cases and open offices up and down the East Coast. Three years in, he secured the firm’s largest multimillion-dollar settlement. Several multimillion-dollar verdicts quickly followed.

By all accounts, Rutter says, his career was going well. That’s when he walked away.

“I had this moment of clarity in the early 2000s,” he says. “I had been away from home 160 days two years in a row. I also had a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old. I couldn’t see those two things moving along the same trajectory.”

Around the same time, Rutter’s father retired. Rutter and his then-partner, Robert Mills, renamed the practice Rutter Mills and decided to shift their focus to Virginia.

“It turned out to be the best personal and the best economic decision I’ve ever made,” he says. “I was back at home in a market I knew well. I had a lot of connections in the area that helped us rebuild the holes from letting go of the other business. And I was able to live into the father and husband roles that have made me a better, more empathetic injury lawyer.”

 

‘The business will take care of itself’

Rutter opens our Zoom interview with a virtual tour of the Backyard — a new indoor/outdoor workspace perched atop Rutter Mills’ Norfolk office. With couches, firepits, a kitchen, and collaboration rooms, the office retreat is designed to encourage creative thinking amid the comforts of home.

It’s also the direct result of the same conversations many businesses have been having since COVID-19. As a client-forward business that relies on in-person trials, depositions, and meetings, Rutter Mills had to bring employees back to the office. But Rutter could also see that employees were working well from home and other environments.

“For a lot of folks, the built office environment didn’t meet them where they were in terms of how they like to work and what’s most efficient for them,” he says. “So I said we need to reimagine the built work environment to address these concerns. Businesses in San Francisco and New York are thinking about this, too, and building living room areas and outdoor areas so that people feel they can work in the space that they like.”

The Backyard is just one way Rutter wants to rethink the business of law.

After his own experience choosing family over a hard-driving career, Rutter developed a new appreciation for putting people first. He saw his clients coming in after being injured or losing a job or a family member. More than anything, they needed nurturing and support.

At Rutter Mills, he says, they have a higher number of team members to support the attorneys because he believes personal injury cases require a personal touch. Building trust can’t be done with automated texts and artificial intelligence.

“Sometimes, we need to call our clients just to ask how they’re doing,” he says. “A conversation about the case or an investigation is hard to do with the same level of empathy that you would have for a friend or family member.”

Rutter also eschews the idea that lawyers need to remain dispassionate, disinterested observers. Injury litigation, he says, requires heart. You have to build a relationship with your clients and get to know them on a personal level in order to tell their story in front of a judge and jury.

“My father said, ‘If you have a big heart, it’s going to feel tugged into these cases. You have to let it happen,’” he says. “If you can’t feel for your client, you can’t feel for the case. When your head and your heart are in it together, you’re going to better represent your client.”

It’s a perspective he tries to impart on to the next generation of lawyers at Rutter Mills — including two in particular. His two sons, Carter and Austin, decided to follow in his footsteps and are now in their third year at Richmond Law.

Rutter also strives to create the same ecosystem of love, care, and support for his employees. The firm is competitive, and the cases are demanding. But Rutter is adamant that their work not come at the expense of life outside the office.

The added staff allows for a better distribution of work, while clear processes keep cases moving forward with the aim of getting everyone home for dinner. It’s rare, he says, to have people working into the evening or on weekends.

Again, Rutter’s actions are guided by the words of his father: Take care of the people you work with, and the business will take care of itself.

“People think that to be highly profitable, to be a strong litigator, to be a boss, you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to be mean,” Rutter says. “You just don’t. We are life-first, people-first — and that doesn’t mean that the organization we’ve built at Rudder Mills is soft or easy. There’s a lot to do, and we demand world-class work.

“A kind, nurturing environment is not mutually exclusive to a hard-charging, profitable litigation practice.”

 

‘What are the roadblocks we can kick down?’

There’s no question that Rutter is passionate about his family, his legal practice, and his ideas for creating a people-centered work environment. Only one other topic might come close: his love of the arts.

In the late 1980s, Rutter and his soon-to-be wife Meredith were fresh out of college and living in New York City. By day, Rutter worked on Wall Street. Meredith, meanwhile, took her economics degree and interest in arts to Sotheby’s auction house, where she was a business manager trainee.

“That just ignited me, being around all these beautiful things all day long,” Meredith says. “All of the paintings: American contemporary, the impressionists, 19th-century old masters. That was a dream job.”

By night, they could be found wandering galleries, strolling through art fairs, and attending openings in SoHo, which was then a nascent arts district. They went to the Met and other art museums when they could afford it. Sometimes, they would stop in to Sotheby’s to see what was coming up for auction.

As their relationship grew, so did their shared connection to art.

When Rutter graduated from Richmond Law in 1994, he and Meredith celebrated by purchasing their first serious piece of art from Sotheby’s: a color field painting by the abstract expressionist Theodoros Stamos.

“If the house was burning down, that’s the one we would grab,” Rutter says. “It got us to step up and buy art that we love. And it’s mile-marker zero on a fabulous journey.”

That journey led the Rutters to build their collection with a focus on contemporary art. Both feel a pure emotional connection to the color and form of abstract art.

“Brother loves the intellectual side,” Meredith says. “I’m more about the aesthetics. I love to walk the fairs and see something on the wall that stops me in my tracks.”

Today, their collection includes paintings, sculpture, glass, and video works from artists like Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland, Teresita Fernández, Gene Davis, Maya Lin, Thomas Downing, Paul Reed, Jonas Wood, Jeffrey Gibson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Hank Willis Thomas. They have donated and loaned several works to museums around the world with an eye toward more diverse representation.

“We try to find the holes in museum collections and fill them,” Rutter says. “That way, these arts organizations and museums can tell a richer, fuller story of art history that includes all artists. We’ve developed a lot of joy putting together this collection, and we’re finding that there’s a lot of joy in sharing it with others.”

At the same time, the Rutters started to take on philanthropic roles in a variety of arts organizations. Both were members of the Collectors Committee at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and have served on the board of trustees for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Meredith also joined the boards of the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and the Norfolk Society of Arts.

Then, in 2015, they decided to start their own — the Rutter Family Art Foundation — to share their collection and bring even more contemporary art to the community.

The Rutters purchased the iconic but dilapidated Texaco building, a 100-year-old industrial space in downtown Norfolk. They completely stripped and rebuilt the 15,000-square-foot building, creating a gallery and music venue, offices for the foundation, community engagement spaces, and a few apartments.

The Texaco building was also a cornerstone of the burgeoning NEON, or New Energy of Norfolk, Arts District. The Rutter Family Art Foundation joined other studio-based ventures to provide space for artists to create and show their work alongside longtime cultural institutions like the Chrysler Museum and the Harrison Opera House.

“Back in [the mid-2010s], a lot of cities were looking at downtown revitalizations in part by leaning into the arts and arts districts,” Rutter says. “Norfolk was doing the same, trying to find a place and a space. Our building needed to be revitalized to be the beating heart of the NEON District.”

Since the foundation’s creation, the Rutters have shifted their focus from funding artists and organizing exhibitions on their own to finding ways to remove the roadblocks holding back other local arts organizations.

One thing the foundation offers that no other arts organization can claim is the Texaco building — or rather, the two fully furnished apartments inside. The Rutters offer the apartments to any arts organization in Hampton Roads, free of charge, for any length of time. This helps reduce costs for the Chrysler Museum to bring in a lecturer, the Harrison Opera House to feature a guest conductor, Old Dominion University to host an artist-in-residence, or the city to hire a muralist.

“When we go to organizations and ask what they need, what we’re really asking is, ‘What are the roadblocks in your way that we can kick down?’” Rutter says. “Generally, it’s around organization and budget. One reason they can’t bring an artist in for three weeks is the question of where to put them and how to afford it. We’re able to offer travel stipends, maybe an honorarium, and a free living space. For arts organizations on a tight budget, that’s a game changer.”

Over time, Rutter says they hope to build more apartments for arts organizations throughout Hampton Roads — and to encourage more collaboration among the region’s art districts. They see this as not only an investment in the arts, but in the health of their community and even the future of Rutter Mills.

“We believe that a thriving culture is the heartbeat of any city, of any community,” he says. “People want to live in a city that has a thriving cultural environment. At Rutter Mills and other businesses, it’s hard to attract people who want to live here and raise families here unless we have that rich cultural experience.

“By leaning into our love language of art, we’re supporting our community in an important and necessary way. If we do things to take care of other people, then everything else will take care of itself.”