A funeral service for Charleston attorney Joseph F. Rice, known widely as Joe Rice, the nationally known plaintiffs’ lawyer who died suddenly at his Mount Pleasant office Sept. 3, will be held at 2 p.m. Monday, Sept. 14, at the Charleston Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston. A Celebration of Life reception will follow immediately in the Gaillard Center’s Grand Ballroom.
Rice was 72. He co-founded the Motley Rice law firm, headquartered near Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant, and built a national practice organized around large multi-plaintiff cases against tobacco manufacturers, opioid distributors and asbestos companies. Those lawsuits reshaped disclosure and warning requirements across three industries and produced settlements that funded state health programs for decades.
Born in Winnsboro on March 25, 1954, Rice earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina in 1976 and his law degree from the same institution in 1979. He returned to South Carolina to practice and remained based in the Lowcountry throughout a career that took him into state and federal courtrooms across the country and made him one of the plaintiffs’ bar’s most frequently cited litigators.
The Gaillard Center’s main performance hall seats roughly 1,800 people, a scale that reflects the size of the anticipated turnout from the legal community, business partners and public officials who have signaled they plan to attend. The service is open to all who knew Rice or were shaped by his work; the family and the firm have extended a public invitation.
Rice is survived by his wife, Lisa Summer Rice, his college sweetheart of 47 years; his daughter and Motley Rice law partner, Ann E. Rice Ervin; his son-in-law, R. Tucker Ervin; and grandson Beckett Rice Ervin. His parents, Donnie Dewey Rice Jr. and Betty Mae Dunlap Rice, preceded him in death.