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The Indiana Lawyer wrote a feature story about attorney Roger Coffin in 1994 with the headline “Roger Coffin: lawyer by day, blues band leader by night.”
Thirty-one years later, that headline remains more or less accurate.
These days, the Lance Camaron Band—Coffin’s rollicking blues group—only performs a couple of times a year, most recently in October at American Legion Post 22 in Linton, Ind. (“They were good,” bartender Stephanie Koonce said. “If the crowd stays with the band and the band sounds good, that’s all I can tell you.”)
File cabinets take up the space in his law office where an upright piano used to sit. And Coffin, now 80, is dealing with atrial fibrillation, two compression fractures in his back and balance issues.
“That’s the biggest problem,” the soft-spoken Coffin said. “When I walk, it looks like I’ve already had about a half-pint of whiskey.”
But Coffin is still happily practicing law by day, still helping clients in Morgan County and beyond with issues of Medicaid planning, guardianship, probate, estate planning and more.
“I’m proud of my career,” he said. “I’m proud of going into elder law because usually I’m dealing with people who had a long, productive life and now need a little help to finish it out. You know, that’s a feeling of satisfaction.”
A varied career
Coffin grew up a mile from where his law office is on South Main Street. He went to Indiana University-Bloomington, where he studied zoology and intended to join the Army after graduation. His mother suggested that he would enjoy military service more as an officer and recommended he join the ROTC, which he did.
First Lt. Coffin went to Vietnam in August 1969, working as a brigade medical operations officer in the U.S. Army Medical Service. In that role, he made sure doctors and supplies were situated where they were needed. His work earned him a Combat Medic Badge, which is awarded to Army medical personnel who perform their duties while under enemy fire during active ground combat.
Coffin calls his time in Vietnam “the best year of my life.”
“There’s no other place you can demonstrate your patriotism and you can direct your energies toward your fellow Americans and your country than at war —and being right in the middle of the war,” he said.
He returned home in August 1970 and went to work for the state legislature before heading to law school, which he finished in 2½ years while also working as a probation officer. On May 1, 1974, he was admitted to the bar.
Coffin served as a Morgan County deputy prosecutor for one year, then a public defender for three years. When he went into private practice, he did “everything you can think of”: personal injury, bankruptcy, adoption, family law, divorces, criminal law.
Then, in 1988, the federal government adopted the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which set out rules to help married couples where one spouse went in a nursing home and the other spouse was at home. As Coffin explains it, “Rather than just ruin financially the spouse at home, Congress developed some complex laws that allowed the spouse at home to live more comfortably than under the old rules.”
In the early 1990s, he became one of a handful of lawyers concentrating on elder law.
“I’ve had a private practice in elder law just about as long as anybody else in the state,” he said. “The number of elder law attorneys have dramatically increased because lawyers finally found out that if you don’t know Medicaid and how it works, you can’t do very much estate planning.”
Learning the blues
Around the same time as he switched to elder law, Coffin found himself getting into blues music. He had little formal musical training—just six months of piano lessons when he was 6 years old —and no real knowledge of the blues. But he liked what he heard and he liked to play music.
With encouragement from his friend Tim Miller, who plays bass guitar, they started a band that plays popular blues and rock music by artists such as the Blues Brothers, George Thorogood, the Allman Brothers and B.B. King.
But before he’d perform in public, Coffin, who was then handling a lot of divorces and family law, wanted a stage name in case he ran into an angry opponent outside of the courtroom. Miller suggested the name Lance Camaron.
“I just thought about a lance,” Miller said. “Because at that time – and you may not notice it now – he had a very aggressive personality.”
Coffin’s alter ego, Lance Camaron, was born. (The name should have been “Cameron,” but someone spelled it wrong on a sign and the band decided to keep the misspelling.)
Kenny Costin, the current mayor of Martinsville, was an early fan.
“Everybody knew that if they were going to go to a Lance Camaron event, the food was going to be good, the music was going to be wonderful, and the dance floor was going to be crowded,” Costin said.
The band was at its most active from 1993-97. But when Coffin’s wife and law partner, Patty, said, “I married Roger Coffin, not Lance Camaron,” the band cut back its performance schedule.
“The band was a lot more fun for me than it was for her,” Coffin said.
Patty died in 2015, but “I think one of the reasons we haven’t been real active in the last couple years, is because I’ve been consumed by elder law,” Coffin said. “A lot of people I know are now entering nursing homes. All my friends are either dying or going in long-term care. And I can’t leave them.”
Special-needs trusts
In addition to elder law, Coffin works on special-needs trusts for young people who are horribly injured or disabled. Coffin said the proudest, most important case of his career—State v. Hammans—fell in that area.
The case concerned 16-year-old Nicholas Hammans, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in 1994, leaving his parents to provide lifelong care. They established a disability trust to maintain his Medicaid eligibility and manage the settlement from a related lawsuit. The trust allowed for trustee fees and compensation for personal services provided by family members, ensuring Nicholas received necessary care without losing Medicaid benefits.
After Nicholas’s unexpected death in December 2005, the trust had a balance of $143,860, while the state had paid more than $355,000 in Medicaid expenses. The Hammanses sought compensation for their care and administrative services, which the trial court approved. That left only $1,360 for state reimbursement. The state appealed the trial court’s order granting the payments the Hammanses had requested.
“There was no case law on this because most of the elder law attorneys in the United States of America didn’t have the courage to try to get the caregivers paid first,” Coffin said. “One California attorney told me, ‘Roger, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being successful.’ But we won the appeal, and in the appellate decision, it says, ‘This is a case of first impression in the nation.’ I was happy to be able to do that for the family.”
Still rolling
Coffin is now in his 51st year practicing law, and he has no plans to quit. For one thing, there are clients who need his help, and he has bills to pay at home. He also likes to go fishing offshore in Florida and chartering a boat can be expensive.
Plus, he still likes the work, still works into the evening some nights, and has always been good at his job.
Before Patty died, he said, they went to a jury trial in 19 criminal cases and were successful in all of them.
“Some were hung juries,” he said. “But it was either hung jury or not guilty, 19 times in a row.”
Coffin said he’s had some people suggest that he retire before he makes a mistake. He rejects their thinking.
“We can all make mistakes, and I can certainly make mistakes,” he said. “But I kind of feel like I’m sliding into home plate—you know, safe—because our clients have had success. I’ve enjoyed my career. And I still enjoy it.”•
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