Jim Cheek III, one of the country’s top corporate and securities lawyers and a Bass Berry & Sims mainstay for more than five decades, died Friday. He was 78.

Cheek, a Nashville native who earned his law degree from Vanderbilt University after graduating from Duke University, joined Bass in 1970 after trading stocks for investment firm J.C. Bradford and teaching at Vanderbilt’s School of Law for two years. He began his legal career as a generalist — he told the Scene in 1996 he “looked on those times as some of the best I ever had because they built my judgment” — but soon began to specialize in working with companies, securities matters and mergers and acquisitions.

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