No Ceiling: How James Gathright Found Room to Grow in Law

By the time James Gathright arrived at the UA Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law, he had already lived through several versions of adulthood.

He had worked construction and carpentry through college. He taught percussion in public school. He earned a real estate license. He worked retail in Nashville during the height of COVID-19 while trying to build a career in music. Through it all, he kept playing drums and singing with his band, Blackstrap, booking gigs and managing the business side of the work himself.

What connected those experiences was not a straight path toward law school, but a pattern.

“I would pick things up really quickly,” Gathright said. “Then I’d hit a ceiling.”

One of the clearest examples came during his time working at a JD Sports store in Franklin, Tennessee. Hired first as a sales associate, Gathright quickly moved into leadership roles, becoming a supervisor within weeks and an assistant manager shortly afterward. Before long, the company offered him his own store.

On paper, it looked like success. But the offer forced him to confront a question that had followed him through several jobs already: Was he building a career he wanted, or simply succeeding at the next thing put in front of him?

“I only really liked selling,” he said. “I liked working with people. The further up you got, the less you actually get to do that.”

At the same time, the music career that had brought him to Nashville had begun to stall as the live entertainment industry struggled to recover from the pandemic. When his lease ended, he packed up and moved home to El Dorado.

Looking back, Gathright now sees those years less as false starts and more as a process of elimination. Each job taught him something about the kind of work that energized him and the kind that did not. He liked solving problems. He liked working directly with people. He wanted autonomy. What wore him down was micromanagement, routine administration and work that felt static once he mastered it.

“I learned early on that I’m going to swim regardless,” he said. “I may not know what I’m doing when I start, but I’m going to figure it out.”

For most of his life, Gathright had never imagined becoming an attorney — he had earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in music. Then he took a job working for a lawyer in El Dorado. The opportunity came through a connection he made while working in real estate, and at first, the position was practical. The firm needed help, and Gathright needed work. What surprised him was how much he enjoyed it.

“I enjoyed finding the missing pieces,” he said.

The work felt different from anything he had done before. Instead of reaching a point where everything became routine, the legal field seemed to expand the deeper he got into it. There was always another angle to consider, another layer of analysis beneath the surface.

At one point, Gathright mentioned pursuing a paralegal certification to increase his earning potential. The attorney he worked for had another suggestion.

“Why don’t you just go to law school?” he remembered him saying.

The idea had never seriously crossed his mind before.

“I didn’t even know that I could go back to law school after the degrees that I got,” Gathright said.

Still, Bowen offered something important: proximity to the life he had already built. The law school allowed him to remain connected to his family, his music network and the people who had supported him through years of uncertainty and career changes.

So he took the LSAT, applied to Bowen before receiving his score and committed fully to the opportunity in front of him.

“If I didn’t get into Bowen,” he said, “I wasn’t going to law school.”

Like many of the decisions that brought him there, Gathright approached law school without having everything perfectly figured out. During his first semester at Bowen, he was commuting daily from El Dorado to Little Rock while planning a wedding and trying to avoid taking on significant student debt. To make morning classes, he often left home around 6 a.m. and did not return until late in the evening.

“I didn’t have time to read,” he said. “I didn’t have time to do anything.”

Eventually, after conversations with attorneys and mentors, he realized the arrangement was not sustainable. He moved to Little Rock during his first semester, and later, his wife, Emilia, joined him.

That support system, combined with Bowen’s hands-on approach to legal education, helped steady the transition into law school.

Outside the classroom, Gathright continued performing with his band while building legal experience through clerkships and externships at places including the Arkansas Municipal League, Simmons Bank, Nash Law Firm, and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The experiences exposed him to a wide range of legal work, from estate planning and secured transactions to bankruptcy proceedings and business-related matters. Along the way, he also learned what did not fit.

“I don’t really want to litigate at all,” he said with a laugh.

Instead, he found himself increasingly drawn toward transactional and tax-related work, particularly the strategic problem-solving involved in business and finance.

Then he took Federal Income Tax.

“It was my favorite class I’ve taken in law school,” Gathright said. “It just made sense.”

For Gathright, the appeal of tax law was not simply the subject matter. It was the realization that he had finally found a field that could continue challenging him long term.

“This is a field that keeps evolving,” he said.

The more he studied business and tax law, the more Gathright recognized connections to experiences he had already accumulated outside the classroom. Years of managing bookings, contracts, payments and logistics for his band had given him an unexpected introduction to the business side of professional life. His work in retail, real estate and sales had also shaped the way he thought about systems, negotiation and client relationships.

As his interest in tax law grew, Gathright began talking with faculty mentors and practicing attorneys about what it would take to build a career in the field. Following graduation from Bowen this weekend and the bar exam this summer, he plans to begin the Tax LL.M. program at the University of Florida Levin College of Law while working with RMP in Little Rock.

In some ways, the direction surprised him. Tax law had never been part of the original plan because there had never really been an original plan. Instead, his path to law school was built piece by piece through experience, trial and error, and a willingness to keep moving toward opportunities that felt meaningful.

“I think something I’ve noticed,” he said, “is that it really is never too late to start over or find a different path.” That perspective has become one of the clearest lessons he carries from his journey to Bowen. “Don’t be afraid to pivot into something,” he said. “If you think you’d like it, go try it.”

For Gathright, the willingness to step into unfamiliar territory repeatedly led him somewhere unexpected: a legal career that finally felt expansive enough to grow alongside him.