Television ads featuring Jack Prescott and his Twin Cities law firm's tagline — "This is all we do, and we do it well" — made him Minnesota's best known and busiest bankruptcy attorney over several decades.
Prescott, a practicing attorney for more than 50 years until 2009, died March 4. He was 87.
In 1986, about a year after lawyers were allowed to appeal to the public, Prescott began doing television commercials. He crafted the catch phrase to get around the laws of the day that forbid lawyers from advertising that they are "specialists."
The pitch became seared on the minds of television viewers, sometimes running 25 times a week on Channel 9, and included his declaration of being "the busiest bankruptcy lawyer in Minnesota."
The ads worked, Prescott said in a 2002 Star Tribune interview, because he looks honest. "They seem to do better during the soaps. I don't know why," he said.
By 2001, Prescott's firm was handling roughly 3,000 bankruptcy cases a year, representing about 20 percent of all such cases in the state.
"You can't talk about bankruptcies in Minnesota without talking about Jack Prescott," Ernest Peake, an attorney at another firm that dealt frequently with Prescott's clients, said in the early 1990s.
Bankruptcy, Prescott said, is "a little bit like a confession. Making the decision to come see us is the hardest part. Usually when they walk out of here they have a smile on their face."
