For years, Joe Genshlea has been known as one of the best trial lawyers in California. Regularly lionized as such by his peers — including his being voted into the state’s Trial Lawyers Hall of Fame in a ceremony presided over by California Supreme Court Associate Justice Ming W. Chin — Genshlea’s reputation could give you the impression he’s a fiery, hellfire-and-brimstone orator.

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You might envision him making sweeping gestures and using his lean build and ironic tone of voice to intimidate the opposing counsel — and possibly even the judge. Since he already was celebrated as a compelling raconteur who even starred in three one-man shows about his and Sacramento’s life, it’s logical to assume he’d be a larger-than-law presence in the courtroom.

But Genshlea, now 86 and retired, was deceptively avuncular when he tried a case. Sometime in 2009 I saw him in action. Instead of resorting to physical melodramatics and verbal pyrotechnics, his interrogating technique owed more to storyteller warmth than bellicose heat. You could watch him break down someone lying under oath by simply asking the accused to tell the court “in your own words” what “everyone seems to be missing” about the issue at hand and about the accused’s own good character. 

In a matter of moments, the testimony proved so brazenly false that the accused pretty much did the judge and jury’s work for them. Never in all of the trial had Genshlea, who has a strong  speaking and singing voice (his favorite tune is “Danny Boy”), ever had to raise it.

I had come to watch Genshlea in action after he’d asked me to help him prepare the first of those one-man shows as a fundraiser for the now-permanently curtained Sacramento Theatre Company. While I already had known and liked him — he was witty, an insatiable reader and always seemed to have a mischievous spark in his eye — I’d heard younger litigators at the law firm McDonough, Holland & Allen (also now permanently curtained) speak with dread about having to face him in court. 

Since I’d be working closely with him as a quasi co-writer of the show he had in mind about growing up in Sacramento, which would eventually be called “A Sense of Place,” I thought it was essential to see him in action. After all, in a few weeks, he’d have to hold the attention (and affection) of a theater audience for a two-act, 95-minute show. He was also in his early 70s, still working and, though energetic and still runner-trim, that’s a long time for someone to just talk and talk.

The show was a bigger hit for STC than some of its own shows in 2010. Produced by the company’s artistic director Peggy Shannon and directed by Mark Standriff, her managing director, it was performed twice. The audience was filled each time with his professional peers, lifelong friends, extensive family and more than a few young attorneys, actors and academics who were curious about if this legal icon would pull it off.

Genshlea went on to do two sequels to the show (one a fundraiser for Sierra Forever Families, a Roseville-based adoption agency), both of which I “directed” — if you could call it directing when all I suggested was that he should stand up on this line and sit down on that line.

Because of his years of experience prowling and almost dancing across a courtroom floor, Genshlea knew exactly when, where and why to move from stage left to stage right, and sometimes to comically challenge the audience at downstage center.

Leading up to the show, Genshlea had no illusions about his seeming lack of theatrical chops. Doing a try-out of the play one afternoon for a small audience in a conference room, he listened patiently after his performance as one of the attendees rattled off question after criticism about the play. Afterward, Genshlea turned to me and said with a smile, “You know, that guy seemed to like everything about my show except my show.”

Sitting in the kitchen of his Land Park home one recent very warm afternoon as his and his wife Barbara Como’s enormous (and enormously friendly) English sheepdogs sit nearby, Genshlea reminds me that he lives “about two blocks” from the house in which he grew up (the home he’s lived in for decades was the family doctor’s).

Raised with two sisters, he’s the father of three grown children by his first wife, and has eight grandkids. 

During the 29 years his father oversaw boxing and wrestling as secretary of the California Athletic Commission, “Little Joey,” as he refers to himself kiddingly, met some of the world’s greatest fighters, including Joe Louis and Primo Carnera. But he didn’t become athletic himself until he was studying for the California Bar 50-some years ago and says, “I was so nervous my hands broke out in warts.” An on-campus doctor asked him if he ever exercised, and Genshlea confessed he never did. “The doc said I should start,” he says, “to relieve my stress.” 

Serving in the military reserves at the time, “All I had were a pair of Army boots, and I started running in those. I must have looked ridiculous.” Even so, he would spend the next 45 years as an almost-daily runner, finishing at number 5,411 in the 83rd annual running of the Boston Marathon — an accomplishment he cheekily includes in his official bio. (In truth, that’s notable: There were 6,674 runners in that 1983 event.)

Shortly after he became a litigator, which he would be for the next half-century, Genshlea won his very first trial. “It involved a $600 pool table owned by Crocker Bank,” he recalls. “I represented the bank. I think I won because nobody could see me shaking.”

In his career, Genshlea went on to win or settle dozens of major cases along with peer-granted accolades for his work as an attorney. Some of his headline-making victories included: Bank of America vs. KPMG Peat Marwick, in which Genshlea represented BofA against KPMG for accounting malpractice; Sacramento Savings & Loan vs. Price Waterhouse, in which he worked for the state’s S&L Association, “which had been the subject of large-scale fraud,” he recalls; and Lofings v. Lightoleer, for which his client was Lofings, the generations-old lighting fixtures store in which Lightoleer, which manufactured lighting fixtures, tried to mandate that Lofings buy certain products before it would sell the store more in-demand products. Genshlea settled the matter for “100 percent of the losses claimed by Lofings,” he says.

While retired Sacramento Superior Court Judge Ronald Tochterman has known Genshlea since they were Boy Scouts together and has been an “up-the-street neighbor for about 40 years,” he says they became really close when he succeeded Tochterman as a law clerk for Judge Thomas J. MacBride in 1964. 

Asked about Genshlea’s skills as a litigator, Tochterman says of his old friend, “He’s highly intelligent and, as you know, a great storyteller. Jurors love him.”

Rosemary Kelley, a retired business trial lawyer who specialized in banking and health care, not only worked on several cases with Genshlea but has known him since they were both 6 years old. “He was beginning first grade, and I was beginning second grade at Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Sacramento,” she recalls.

 “Joe can still remember the name of every kid who was in his class all through school — and something about that person. He has an amazing memory.”

Throughout, Genshlea has never neglected the city that nurtured him, donating hundreds of hours to civic and charitable organizations and serving in multiple nonprofit directorships. He was president of the board of directors of the Sacramento Area Commerce and Trade Association (predecessor of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, which aims to lure businesses to, and keep businesses in, the Capital Region). 

He also promoted the vision of Gold Rush Park in 2006, which would have been a regional recreational corridor somewhat patterned after New York City’s Central Park at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, connecting downtown Sacramento and West Sacramento to Cal Expo and Sacramento State University. Six years earlier, he even ran for mayor of Sacramento but lost to Heather Fargo. 

Kelley adds that her friend of 70-plus years “is smart academically and even smarter in emotional intelligence. He is a supreme people person, charming and charismatic. All were huge assets as a trial lawyer. He was friendly with everyone, and had a smile and a ready quip for all. Big corporate clients loved him because he could make a set of complex facts understandable to anyone and make a friend in the process. He was great with juries. 

“He could make a pal of anyone,” she says.  

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