Throughout her career, Stephanie Malone has been a study in contrasts — a female member of her college’s sports information department who was assigned to cover men’s sports; a state legislator who never ran for so much as student council in high school; a consummate communicator who, in her words, is not particularly effective as a public speaker; and the non-lawyer leading a trade association representing attorneys.
Yet it is from that posture of apparent disadvantage in virtually every chapter of her career that her superpower arose. Malone is a connector of the highest order, a woman of vast networking resources, connecting them to address problems and get needed projects done.
“The biggest thing that I’ve leaned into was my ability and my friendships and my relationships, bringing everybody together in a room to just sit down and talk,” she said. “With that comes trust, you know, ‘OK, if there’s going to be this type of proposal, then here are the effects.’
“I’ve developed a lot of trust through the years that people knew I would set meetings up and trust that in those meetings, everyone could get their message across in a safe and effective way.”
Each stop on Malone’s professional journey underscored her natural ability to bring different kinds of people together for a common purpose, starting at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she earned a degree in broadcast journalism. Her first jobs in Fort Smith after graduation addressed economic development and helped reimagine Fort Chaffee prior to her time serving in the Arkansas legislature.
“I was 29 when I was elected. There were several women in the legislature with me, but I was by far the youngest,” she said. “My first term, I went in to sit at a committee table, and a staff member came up and turned to one of my colleagues and said, ‘Your daughter can’t be with you at the committee table.’ I was like, “Oh my gosh, no, I’m a legislator. I promise I’m supposed to be here.’”
Most recently has been her time as CEO of the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, taking the job a couple of weeks after COVID-19 shut everything down. She survived those stressful early challenges and today is tackling the issue of building a future attorney workforce in a state that is critically underserved.
“The last year and a half, we’ve been very proactive in reaching out to both of the state’s law schools. We host job fairs, and we invite [students] to our continuing education classes to make those connections and for our members to be mentors,” she said.
“It’s a great opportunity for our members to mix with them, to help them work out their frustrations with law school and with balancing school and life.”
Malone’s overarching responsibilities are to help ease members’ burden over building and maintaining legal practices for the good of all Arkansans.
“I think most people don’t think about how important lawyers are until they need one,” she said. “We are a rural state, and a lot of our members are a one-stop shop who are the front line for when someone has been wronged.
“Our members aren’t corporate lawyers; they’re individual Arkansans who went to law school and earned a law degree to go help the underdog and fight for the little guy. They live in our communities, and they’re all across the state. They go to church with us, they’re Little League coaches, and they’re who Arkansans turn to in a crisis.”
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