Judge Andrews gave immediate promise of celebrity as an advocate. With a sensitive and nervous temperament, he entered sympathetically into the case of his client, making it his own. He possessed a brilliant readiness of manner, full of skillful thrusts, hits, and witticisms. His correct New England morals were not deteriorated by contact with the more loose codes of a new western town. In his clear and earnest voice there was that magnetic influence, which is necessary to complete the style of any orator, and which is a gift solely of nature. As a technical pleader, though he stood high, there were others upon the circuit equally gifted. But in a cause where his convictions of justice and of legal right were fixed, there was not among his contemporaries, in the courts of this State, an advocate, whose efforts were so nearly irresistible before a jury. He has command of sarcasm and invective, without coarseness. He attacks oppression, meanness and fraud as if they were offences not only against the public, but against himself. He has never strayed from the profession to engage in any speculations or occupations to divert his thoughts from pure law, except for two years from 1840, while he held a seat in Congress. In 1848, the Legislature elected him judge of the Superior Court of Cuyahoga county, a place he continued to hold till the Court was abolished. As a judge he was eminently successful, his decisions having been overruled by higher courts only in a single instance, and that owing to a clerical mistake. In politics he was evidently not at home. After leaving the bench, Judge Andrews returned to the practice, but has been chiefly employed as associate counsel, occasionally addressing juries on important cases.
As an advocate, Judge Andrews, during his whole professional career, has been in the very foremost rank, with a reputation confined neither to county, or even State lines. Distinguished for clear conceptions of legal principles, and their varied relations to practical life, he has also shown rare ability in judging of mixed questions of law and fact. His legal opinions, therefore, have ever been held in the highest esteem.
But as jury lawyer, Judge Andrews has achieved successes so remarkable as to have secured a permanent place in the traditions of the bar, and the history of judicial proceedings in Northern Ohio. The older lawyers have vivid recollections of a multitude of cases when he was in full practice, and in his prime, in which his ready insight into character--his power to sift testimony and bring into clear relief the lines of truth involved in complicated causes--his ability to state the legal principles so that the jury could intelligently apply them to the facts--his humor--his pure wit--his pathos, at times bringing unfeigned tears to the eyes of both judge and jurors--his burning scorn of fraud--and his appeal on behalf of what he believed to be right, so impetuous with enthusiasm, so condensed and incisive in expression, and so felicitous in illustration, as to be well nigh irresistible.