Barrister of the Month
Erin B. Moore Esq. Green & Green, Lawyers
I
t is often said that Dayton has a collegial bar and that is certainly true perhaps most vividly among those lawyers who practice in the courtroom. These are lawyers who know each other well. They have faced off often. Their skills and shortcomings have been displayed to captive audiences of judges and juries with a client’s freedom or fortunes, or both, hanging in the balance. Every seasoned trial lawyer knows the thrill of victory and the misery of defeat. In this city, the victors temper their triumphs with the knowledge that their adversaries are worthy and honorable, that defeat could well befall them one day at the hands of the other. The defeated are not disgraced. Their future victories await. Erin Moore well knows the highs and lows of trial work. She has been doing it for over twenty-five years, the last 23 here in Dayton at Green & Green. She came to the firm a few months before the death of its founder, F. Thomas Green, a lifelong and highly successful insurance defense attorney known for his capacity to invoke rage in the souls of plaintiff ’s lawyers who dared to sue one of his clients.
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Dayton Bar Briefs February2021
When Erin arrived, the firm had already been placed in the capable hands of Green’s son, Thomas M. Green, his father’s equal in skill and diligence, but whose diplomacy with adversaries contrasted patently with the elder Green’s penchant for sarcasm. Born in Bloomfield, Indiana, Erin knew at a young age that the law would be her calling. Perry Mason was her first hero in the legal profession, the lawyer who never lost a case, whose clients were always falsely accused of murder, and who always established his client’s innocence by exposing the real murderer. Black and white television reruns were not her only source of fictional legal enjoyment. As a youngster, she was an avid reader of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Agatha Christie novels. Erin played softball and was a cheerleader in high school. A photo of her in her cheering uniform is still displayed prominently in the Bloomfield High School gym. After graduating in the top ten of her high school class in the spring of 1986, she entered Indiana University that fall. Her success as a student continued at IU where she was Phi Beta Kappa
majoring in English and criminal justice. After graduating early in December, 1989, Erin worked as a legal assistant at a Bloomington law firm until the next fall when she entered the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. In law school, Erin was a moot court competitor and an inductee of Phi Delta Phi, the honorary legal fraternity. Among her classmates was Mark Godsey, the director of the Ohio Innocence Project, who famously freed Ohio inmate Ricky Jackson after serving forty years of a life sentence for an East Cleveland murder he did not commit. For at least a portion of that prison term, Mr. Jackson was on death row.
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