Don’t tell anyone, but Curtis Elliott actually likes the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, he sympathizes with the people who work there. “We’re part of the system, too. We owe a duty to the public to uphold the integrity of the self-assessment system.”

Elliott, 48, and his Charlotte firm, Culp, Elliott & Carpenter, specialize in tax and estate-planning law. Much of the time, his clients’ interests run squarely into the IRS’s. “We try to help clients plan their affairs to minimize their taxes as much as legally possible while trying to stay within the spirit of the Internal Revenue Code, and we counsel our clients to do the same thing.”

He believes the agency is unfairly pilloried in many quarters. That empathy with his opponents, coupled with a commitment to his clients, makes him effective in his field, he says.

Unlike many lawyers, Elliott didn’t dream early in life of going into law. He grew up in Gastonia. His father was a cotton merchant and broker, and his mother was a housewife. Elliott attended the University of South Carolina, where he walked on to the golf team, playing for two years before winning a scholarship. He majored in business and accounting, and it wasn’t until his senior year that he decided to switch gears. “I just thought, I want to go to law school.”

He did. When he graduated, though, his undergraduate experience drove his career. He wanted to move to Charlotte to be near his family, and his accounting degree caught the eye of the local office of Deloitte and Touche. He practiced tax law there for two years and met future law partner Bill Culp. In 1982, Culp drove the next change. “Bill decided to start his own law practice specializing in tax and estate planning.”

Elliott wanted to join the practice but knew he needed more training. He went to George Washington University and earned a master of law in taxation in 1984. “Having a full-time job for two years and going back to school made it a little easier. I just approached it like a job.”

He joined Culp’s firm, where he is now a senior partner. Among his clients are Gastonia-based textile maker Parkdale Mills, Charlotte-based drywall maker National Gypsum and Charlotte developer The Crosland Group.

The other hangover from his undergraduate days is golf. He is a 2-handicap, a member of Carolina Golf Club in Charlotte and a fan of traditional courses. His favorite is Pinehurst No. 2.

He also has a traditional, conservative approach to tax law. “We try to give clients an honest assessment of what they can and cannot do.” That’s not because he lacks courage. “Tax law is very complex, and we have to be careful. If an issue is in a gray area, we have to be careful to exercise a high level of integrity and judgment.” He tries to stay out of the courtroom, settling most cases before they come to trial. Others are decided within the IRS’ appeals division. But he will pursue a case further if need be.

Duke Kimbrell, chairman of Parkdale and former CEO, has watched Elliott develop over the years. “His daddy was a real good friend of mine. I’ve known him all his life.” Kimbrell says Elliott helped set up both the company’s retirement program and his personal retirement.

They still get together every few months. “I can ask him anything, whether it’s smart or dumb, and get by with it,” Kimbrell says. “He doesn’t help us just to make a dollar. I think he’d do it for nothing if we didn’t have the means.”

Strangers often confuse Alfred Adams for someone else, including golfer Jack Nicklaus and NASCAR driver Sterling Marlin. “I never look like me,” Adams, 57, complains.

His colleagues weren’t confused, however, when they voted him the state’s top real-estate lawyer. Clients, too, are certain that he’s deserving of the honor. “In real estate, he’s the best I’ve ever seen,” says Carl Ricker, owner of Azalea Management & Leasing, an Asheville commercial real-estate firm that Adams has represented for more than 20 years. “He is so meticulous. In as many transactions as he’s done for me — and they add up to $70 million or $80 million worth of work — I can’t think of a single instance when he has made a mistake or not caught someone else’s error.”

Adams grew up in Winston-Salem. He found his calling when his eighth-grade teacher assigned her students to research what they wanted to be when they grew up. His father didn’t know any lawyers. “So being a kid who didn’t know any better, I called Wake Forest’s law school and asked to talk to the dean.” The late Carroll Weathers invited the boy to his office and talked to him for more than an hour.

Most of his practice is built around contract work for buying and selling properties for clients such as Lowe’s and Thomasville Furniture. He learned the art of negotiation early in his career, while closing the sale of the first $100,000 home sold in north Asheville. The transaction nearly fell apart because of a $100 wall sconce.

“That was one of the first instances when I had to use diplomacy to get the buyer and seller to reach an agreement,” Adams says. He put the parties in separate rooms to diffuse the tension. He then counseled each side on the relative importance of the overall transaction. “They began to see the wall sconce was not worth the angst it had created. At the end of the day, we closed the deal — the buyer ended up buying the sconce for $50. I learned then that if you can avoid putting someone into an inescapable position and allow them to save their prestige, effective solutions can be achieved.”

Between getting his bachelor’s in history in 1968 and his law degree in 1973, he taught high school for two years in Winston-Salem and in Maryland. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” Adams says. And he means it. For the past seven years, he has been an adjunct professor at Wake’s law school. He also has been chairman of the North Carolina Bar Association’s continuing legal education committee and its real-property section. It’s the teacher in him that has made him a good lawyer, he says. “You’ve got to teach the jury, the judge or the person on the other side of the table about your position — your theory on the law or the case.”

As an undergraduate, he worked as a ski instructor in Boone during his winter breaks. After law school, he wanted to be back in the mountains, so he started his career in Asheville. He practiced at Van Winkle, Buck, Wall, Starnes & Davis for 21 years, working on residential and commercial real-estate transactions. In 1994, Winston-Salem-based Petree Stockton recruited him and let him focus on the commercial side. He moved to Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in 2001.

Like most real-estate lawyers, Adams rarely sees the inside of a courtroom. The last case he tried was 29 years ago, when he represented an apartment complex that was suing a tenant whose dog had wet on the carpet. “I won,” Adams says, “and retired from litigation undefeated.”

Bright and early one morning, as you pull away from the drive-through window and take a big bite out of that steak-and-egg biscuit, think of Ken Sibley. He helped make your breakfast possible.

Sibley wrote the patents on the process used to pasteurize the egg. The fast-food fry cook in the back wasn’t breaking any eggs to cook your meal. The eggs arrive precracked and pasteurized, which extends their shelf life. But pasteurization is tricky. Heat the eggs too much, they scramble; not enough, germs remain. It wasn’t until the mid-’80s that food scientists at N.C. State University perfected the process. The patents Sibley wrote for State have been challenged many times, but they’ve held up.

The egg breakthrough is among a long list of Sibley’s patents, mostly for biotechnology and chemical innovations. “To say he’s at the cutting edge is an understatement,” says Mark Crowell, director of the Office of Technology Development at UNC Chapel Hill. Working with faculty at UNC, State, East Carolina and other universities, Sibley has written patents for everything from human gene therapy to drug-screening systems.

“Our faculty relate to him beautifully,” Crowell says. “They consider him almost a scientific colleague. It’s not, ‘Oh God, I have to work with the lawyers.’ Some of them get a kick out of sitting down with him, because he’s very conversant in their science.”

If not for a dinner at a Japanese steakhouse, he might actually have been one of their colleagues. Sibley graduated with a bachelor’s in biology and psychology and went to the University of Rochester to do brain research, aiming for a career in pharmaceutical development or teaching. One night out with his wife, Barbara, he struck up a conversation with a Kodak patent lawyer, whose job sounded intriguing. “I was at a crossroads. My immediate research project wasn’t panning out. I needed to start a new one or make a career change.” He chose the latter and headed to law school at Duke.

He’s still at Duke, taking time out from his private practice to teach a patent-law course and a patent-writing seminar every semester. “Sometimes around here we call him ‘the professor,’” partner Mitch Bigel says.

But Sibley’s combination of academic and pragmatist works, Bigel adds. “He’s really into the legal, theoretical part of intellectual property law, and there are a lot of people like that whose heads are in the clouds.”

The two met at Charlotte-based Bell, Seltzer, Park & Gibson, which Sibley joined in 1985 after getting his law degree. Three years later, he moved to its Raleigh office, and in 1997, Sibley, Bigel and 14 other lawyers left to start a new firm. Myers Bigel Sibley & Sajovec wrote 476 patents last year, more than any other North Carolina-based firm, Bigel says.

When it comes to patent law, Sibley says, you can’t delegate much. “Understanding a client’s technology is a fairly personal service.” He has developed relationships with inventors such as Joseph DeSimone, the wunderkind chemistry and chemical engineering professor at UNC and State, who holds more than 70 patents.

Sibley has been DeSimone’s legal counsel since he began his research 10 years ago. He is practically a collaborator, DeSimone says: “When you are trying to flesh out your ideas and you’ve got an attorney there that is not just note taking but contributing and teaching you patent strategy and thinking through the details, he really becomes one of the team during the process. I find that invaluable.”

Penni Pearson Bradshaw was a mother’s dream. At Westchester High School in Philadelphia, she was an A-plus student, a tennis star, a member of student government and a writer for the student newspaper. To avoid the distractions of a coed campus, she picked Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., where she graduated magna cum laude with a double major in religion and American studies.

She still maintains that image, but it masks a hard edge. She is one of the state’s most effective advocates for companies facing employment-law issues. “She is about 5 feet tall, but she is tenacious,” says Frank Murphy, vice president and general counsel of Winston-Salem-based Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, one of her clients.

Bradshaw says that she has never had a “significant adverse jury verdict” and that she gets many cases dismissed before trial. Her time now is spent advising companies trying to establish human-resources systems. But once a dispute turns into a lawsuit, her litigation style comes into play. “My approach in a deposition is be nice and low-key. Let them talk,” she says. “People let down their guard that way. You can catch them in a lie, in inconsistencies. It’s fun. You know you’ve got ’em.”

Growing up, Bradshaw never gave law much thought. Her father was an insurance executive, and he moved the family several times. At Randolph-Macon, her writing and leadership skills got her named editor of the school newspaper, but by her senior year, she still hadn’t decided what she would be. An aptitude test showed she was suited for law. Her college grades and law-school entrance-exam scores were so good that Carolina offered her a free ride.

Employment-law courses were her favorite, but it took a few years for her to practice in that field. She joined Petree Stockton, a Winston-Salem firm that would merge with an Atlanta firm to become Kilpatrick Stockton, and handled real-estate closings, auto-insurance claims and an occasional employment case.

In her first year, Bradshaw represented Salisbury, which had been sued by property owners fighting annexation. She won the first round, and the appeal went straight to the N.C. Supreme Court. Bradshaw crafted a tight legal brief with a point-by-point defense of the city’s right to annex. “My concept was to keep it simple, keep the court focused on what the requirements were under the statutes, point out that the issues raised by the other side were attempts to make things confusing,” she says. Salisbury won.

By her fifth year, she was focused solely on employment law. Her firm represented large North Carolina companies, and Bradshaw became their employment-law counselor. She divided her time between defending against employee lawsuits over such things as discrimination and advising human-resources departments how to avoid problems. She noticed that companies often ran into immigration issues when hiring technical or engineering experts, so she developed a subspecialty: immigration law.

Bradshaw is active in local civic organizations, though she became sidetracked by a family emergency. Her daughter was diagnosed with a fatal heart defect and was put on a transplant waiting list. Three years ago, at age 11, she died.

Now, every Saturday morning, Bradshaw plays hostess for three hours in the Ronald McDonald Room at Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem. “I really now know how not to sweat the small stuff,” she says.