Profile

By John Temple Ligon Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Stanley McGuffin

Super Lawyers magazine lists attorneys in each state chosen by their peers and through independent research. The magazine appears in top city and regional publications such as Atlanta Magazine, Charlotte Magazine, and The New York Times. It was in the local distribution of The New York Times that Super Lawyers magazine's South Carolina edition appeared.

Columbia bankruptcy lawyer Stanley McGuffin is counted among South Carolina's Super Lawyers.

McGuffin was born in Sumter, S.C., where his father was an agent for the Internal Revenue Service. IRS agents move a lot, and McGuffin's father moved the family to Spartanburg almost immediately after he was born.

McGuffin has three younger brothers. The youngest brother is an accountant with BellSouth in Atlanta. The middle brother is a career Coast Guard officer assigned to Elizabeth City, N.C., and his oldest brother is a computer salesman, also in Atlanta.

McGuffin attended kindergarten in Spartanburg, but he began elementary school in Greenville. He continued elementary school in Columbia (Forest Lake), Atlanta, and the District of Columbia, finishing the sixth grade in Nashville, Tenn.

McGuffin began high school in Irmo, and his sophomore and junior years were in Richmond, Va., but he graduated in Atlanta's Dunwoody community from Peachtree High School.

McGuffin was an accomplished varsity basketball player, and he played both forward and center. He chose not to chase scholarship opportunities at small colleges because he was determined to attend USC in Columbia.

McGuffin majored in business administration in what was then the new business school building on College Street. For his first two years, he lived in the Honeycombs, and he stayed the next two years in the SAE house.

McGuffin enrolled in law school at USC without missing a beat. His classmates included Charleston's Joe Rice, probably the class's most successful class-action lawyer, and Knox White, mayor of Greenville.

During his second and third years of law school, McGuffin worked part-time for Jean Bissell, general counsel for South Carolina National Bank, then run by John Lumpkin Sr.

Getting close to law school graduation, McGuffin was also getting close to Linda Hughes, an education major. She graduated from the school of education about the same time he graduated from law school, and they married soon after.

After graduation from law school, McGuffin worked as a staff attorney for the S.C. State Supreme Court for a short while, and then he was lured back to South Carolina National Bank (SCN).

McGuffin left SCN to run the Columbia office for Charleston- based Hutchinson & Warren, where he stayed as a bankruptcy lawyer until the firm merged with Nelson Mullins about 10 years later. McGuffin took a position with the Columbia office of Sinkler Boyd in 1993, and he stayed when the firm became Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd several years ago.

Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd has 160 lawyers in Greenville, Columbia, Charleston, Florence, and Myrtle Beach, where one lawyer specializing in insurance defense occupies the office. Their Columbia office fills two-and-a-half floors of the Capitol Place Building, formerly known as AT&T.

The McGuffins have two children, a married daughter in Seattle and a 13-year-old son who starts the eighth grade this fall at Blythewood Middle School.

McGuffin and his family have lived in Blythewood since 1983, where his son has become an avid fisherman while McGuffin still relishes the rural setting.