Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1995                   TAG: 9503060018
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV8   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI                                 LENGTH: Medium

SERVING LOCAL GOVERNMENTS A FAR-FLUNG JOB FOR LAWYER

James E. Cornwell Jr., who lives in Narrows and has his law office at 246 N. Washington Ave. in Pulaski, decided in the 1970s that he enjoyed representing local governments in legal matters.

He has been doing it ever since, covering counties as distant and diverse as Brunswick and Bland and keeping a schedule that sometimes even forces him to remember where he is during court hearings representing one of the governments.

Most recently, Cornwell won the appointment as county attorney for New Kent County which is almost as far east as you can go in the state from Southwest Virginia.

He covers himself with a financial arrangement he has worked out with the Richmond law firm of Sands, Anderson, Marks and Miller which has about 45 lawyers and will assist in litigation at times when Cornwell finds himself having to be in two places at once.

After graduating from law school at the College of William and Mary in 1974, Cornwell located in Narrows. Among his early clients were the Giles County Board of Supervisors, Giles County Department of Social Services, and the towns of Narrows and Glyn Lyn.

He decided that he liked working in that kind of law, he said. In the late 1970s, he was hired as full-time attorney for Dinwiddie County in the southeastern part of the state. He stayed there for about two years, but he and his family missed Southwest Virginia and moved back to Narrows.

Next, Cornwell moved to Pulaski and set up a practice concentrating on local government. It is not a typical specialty. He only knows of a few Virginia lawyers in private practice with that concentration.

Currently, he is county attorney for Craig, Bland and now New Kent counties and special projects counsel for Brunswick County. He also still does some governmental work in Giles County.

This week started in Giles, where he appeared on behalf of a county agency in General District Court early Monday. Then he drove to Craig County for a land use enforcement case, and then to an evening meeting of the Bland County Board of Supervisors. He left after that meeting for New Kent County, for a Tuesday morning proceeding there.

After finishing up Tuesday in New Kent, he went to Brunswick County that afternoon for another case. Then it was back to Pulaski before heading for New Kent again Wednesday. He attended a meeting with the Bland County Water Authority Thursday.

``I drive a lot,'' Cornwell said. ``I'm hoping I can keep all the apples in the air.''