How We Got Here

A Phenix City Story, More Than a Century in the Making

If you’ve lived in Phenix City long enough, the Floyd name is already familiar. It’s been on ballots, on hospital charts, on school board minutes, and — for the last three generations — on the door of a law firm on 14th Street. The story of how we got here doesn’t start in a courtroom. It starts in 1892, with a young doctor stepping off the train.

Dr. Ashby Floyd: The First Chapter

Dr. Ashby Floyd arrived in Phenix City in the early 1890s, not long after finishing medical school. He was twenty-six years old, and the town he settled into was rough — a river community on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee, still finding its shape. He opened a medical practice, and for the next fifty-five years, he barely stopped.

By the time he died in 1947, Dr. Ashby had delivered more than six thousand five hundred babies. He had served as mayor of Phenix City. He had sat on the school board. He had served as court recorder. All told, he held public office for roughly forty-four years — a stretch so long that people in town used to say, “As Floyd goes, so goes Beat 10.” His name was shorthand for the direction the community was moving in.

He lived in a home that still stands on the hill overlooking the Chattahoochee — a two-story house he built for his family in 1908, the kind of place that locals started calling Floyd’s Hill because the Floyds had been there so long it was easier to name the whole hill after them. He raised his children in that house. Five of his sons became doctors. One of them, Dr. Charles Eddie Floyd, would carry the name forward into the next generation — and eventually into the legal tradition the firm is built on today.

The Kind of Public Service That Gets Remembered

There’s one story about Dr. Ashby Floyd that tells you everything about the family’s relationship with this town. In the 1920s, when Brick Elementary School needed to be rebuilt and the funds weren’t there, he mortgaged his own home to get the project started. He didn’t ask for recognition. He didn’t ask for repayment. He put his house up so the children of Phenix City would have a school to walk into.

That’s the soil the rest of this story grows out of. When we talk about showing up for our neighbors, we’re not inventing something new. We’re trying to live up to a standard that was set in this town a long time before any of us were admitted to the bar.

Three Generations of Floyd Lawyers

Dr. Charles Eddie Floyd, one of Ashby’s five doctor sons, carried the family forward. His descendants stayed in Phenix City. And when the next generation turned toward the law instead of medicine, they brought the same habits with them — the long hours, the steady presence, the refusal to treat a neighbor like a stranger.

Charles Floyd Jr.

opened the law practice. He had grown up watching his family serve the community in every way it could be served, and he built a firm around a simple promise: the attorney you met in the conference room would be the attorney who answered your phone calls, read your discovery, and stood next to you in the courtroom. No rotating cast of associates. No handing your file off. If a Floyd took your case, a Floyd handled it.

Charles Floyd III

– the dad in our father-and-son team — carried that promise into his own generation. He spent decades practicing law in East Alabama, building the kind of reputation that only comes from returning every phone call, remembering every client’s name, and treating small cases with the same attention as big ones. If you’ve lived in this area for any length of time, you may already know him, or know someone who’s sat across his desk.

Charles Floyd IV

— the son — joined the firm and brought a new generation’s energy to a tradition that was already deep-rooted. Same last name on the door. Same standard for how we talk to clients, how we prepare cases, and how we show up in court. Three generations of Floyd lawyers, and counting.

Where We Practice, and Why

We represent people across Phenix City, Russell County, Lee County, and the communities in all of Alabama. Our work covers injury claims, workers’ compensation, criminal defense, wills, estates, and real estate matters. The cases may change. The clients may come from anywhere along the river. But the way we handle them doesn’t.

A hundred and thirty-plus years ago, Dr. Ashby Floyd mortgaged his home to rebuild a schoolhouse. Today, his descendants sit across a conference room table from neighbors who need help — and the answer to the question “who’s going to handle this for me?” is the same as it’s always been. A Floyd. From start to finish.

We live here, too.

Floyd & Floyd isn’t a downtown-skyscraper firm that took out a billboard on the interstate. We’re your neighbors. You’ll see us at Friday-night games, at the grocery store, at church, at the riverfront. The people we represent aren’t case numbers — they’re the families we run into every week.

That’s not a marketing line. It’s the reason we still practice the way we do.