Harold E
Franklin, Jr.

Five of his recent trials include four high-stakes tobacco trials and a high-profile automotive product liability trial, the latter of which was selected and featured in 2014 by the Daily Report’s “Litigation Department of the Year” award publication.

Earlier in his career Harold was selected by an international Fortune 500 corporation to serve as in-house counsel in its product litigation group. In this role, Harold (while on-loan from King & Spalding) was responsible for selecting and retaining outside counsel and managing complex product liability litigation across the nation. More recently, he was selected by one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers to serve as one of its national written discovery counsel.

Harold is a 1990 graduate of Emory University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Spanish. Prior to entering the legal profession, he served as vice president of an insurance brokerage firm specializing in group benefit plans for many of the nation’s leading insurance companies. Harold received his Juris Doctor from the Georgia State University School of Law in 1999. During law school, he served as a Student Judicial Clerk to the Supreme Court of Georgia and also as a judicial extern with the Federal Reserve Bank. In addition, he studied international law in the 1997 Transnational Comparative Dispute Resolution Program at the law school at Johannes Keppler University in Linz, Austria. While in law school, Harold received numerous awards in local, regional, and national trial and appellate competitions.

Harold is the immediate past president of Atlanta Bar Association, the largest voluntary bar association in the Southeast U.S. A recognized leader, Harold has actively engaged in and led numerous pro bono and community service endeavors in both the legal profession and broader community. A past president of the Gate City Bar Association (Georgia’s oldest historically African-American bar association), in 2007 Harold established the Gate City Justice Robert Benham Law Camp, the organization’s first institutional “pipeline” program. The three-week program (a collaborative effort with the Georgia State University College of Law, King & Spalding, and Clark Atlanta University), fosters and increases diversity in the legal profession by exposing local high school students to the study of the law and career opportunities in the legal profession.

During his tenure as Atlanta Bar president, Harold established the Equal Justice In Law Enforcement (EJLE) Initiative, which engages the legal community and key stakeholders (law enforcement, prosecutorial and defense bars, former offenders and the public) in a focused, collaborative effort to help prevent and lessen the prospect of law enforcement shootings (and/or the use of excessive force) involving non-violent, unarmed citizens.

Harold serves on the national Executive Board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and he is Regional Vice Chair for the organization. He is a key leader of Georgia Election Protection, a non-partisan, pro bono initiative to help ensure the integrity of the electoral process and fair elections.

Harold has lectured locally and nationally on both legal and pro bono related topics ranging from evidentiary issues involving product liability law, to deposition strategy/best practices, to Voting Rights and Non-Partisan Election Protection initiatives, to Ethics in the legal profession. Keynote speaking engagements include: 2008 Bench and Bar Keynote Speaker at the Georgia State University College of Law; 2009 Election Protection Keynote Speaker at 25th Anniversary of the World Conference of Mayors; and 2009 Law Day Keynote Speaker (A Legacy of Liberty - Celebrating Lincoln’s Bicentennial) at the Georgia State University College of Law.

In 2009, Harold was selected by the Georgia United States Congressional Delegation to serve on a 13 member Federal Judicial Advisory panel to the delegation regarding Presidential appointments to selected judgeships on the U.S. District Courts, U.S. Attorneys, and U.S. Marshals in Georgia.

Harold has been named a Georgia Super Lawyer for 2008-2017 by Law & Politics and Atlanta Magazine, as a Legal Elite by Georgia Trend Magazine, recognized by the Daily Report in 2007 as 1 of the Top 15 Lawyers in Georgia under the age of 40, and in 2016 by the Daily Report as a Georgia Attorney of the Year Finalist and he has been recognized by Legal 500 for his national profile as a litigator.