Arkansans who need a refresher course on state history need only visit Paul Parnell at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.
His title reads firm member and CFO, but Parnell also serves in an unofficial capacity as firm historian. The Rose firm, established in 1820, is the oldest law firm in continuous practice west of the Mississippi and the oldest in Arkansas. Its history, like those of several longstanding firms in the state, is richly intertwined with Arkansas history.
Paul Parnell serves as unofficial firm historian at the Rose firm.
George Watkins, the original firm’s third partner and the first chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, codified the old territorial law when Arkansas was granted statehood in 1836. That first codified set of state laws rests inside the law library at the Rose firm, currently home to 41 attorneys based out of offices in Little Rock and Rogers.
“Mr. Watkins was a key player in making sure we had laws in Arkansas,” Parnell said.
The firm’s founders, Robert Crittenden and Chester Ashley, played important roles in the state’s early history. Crittenden was appointed by President James Monroe in 1819 as secretary and first acting governor of the Arkansas Territory to be essentially responsible for its organization. Crittenden County in northeast Arkansas is named for him.
Ashley was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1844, served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and became the namesake of his own county, this one in southeast Arkansas. He was instrumental, Parnell said, in the development of downtown Little Rock. The firm also was home to the private practice of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Arkansas First Lady, U.S. senator from New York and U.S. secretary of state during the Obama administration.
Price Gardner credits the foundation of the Friday firm to its strong leaders.
Little Rock’s Friday, Eldredge & Clark was founded in 1871. It currently has 90 attorneys and an office in Rogers. Friday attorneys were crucial to the development of industrial bonds in the state. Herschel Friday was a noted bond lawyer and respected lobbyist throughout much of the 20th century, and despite his Democratic Party affiliation, was seriously considered as a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon in 1971.
“Mr. Friday was one of the forerunners of developing industrial bonds in Arkansas. He helped write the law,” said Price Gardner, who serves as the firm’s seventh managing partner and whose own practice focuses on bonds. “Our municipal finance department has grown into one of the preeminent firms in the country. If you look at our market share, it’s 85 percent-plus of bond work in Arkansas coming through our firm.”
The firm’s lineage includes William Eldredge, a “world-class trial lawyer,” Gardner said, who helped build the firm’s medical malpractice side; labor lawyer Bill Clark; a tax department that traces its origins back to former partner Bill Bowen, whose name adorns the school of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; and notable Arkansas legal names Buddy Sutton, Jim Simpson and Pat Mehaffy, appointed by President John F. Kennedy as circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
“The foundation of the firm is tied to really strong leaders,” Gardner said. “It’s a legacy, and we all stand on the shoulders of those who brought us in.”
The Hot Springs firm of Schnipper, Britton & Stobaugh is a small firm with just four attorneys but with a continuous practice dating to 1875 and a proud legacy.
SBS attorneys Scott Hickam, from left, John Stobaugh, Nicholas French and Beau Britton work to carry on the firm’s legacy.
In the early to mid-20th century, it opposed the illegal gambling interests that provided the small resort city its notorious renown. The firm was not trying to attach judgment; it was simply opposed to the lawless nature of the gambling operations in town that made life in Hot Springs feel like the Wild West. Decades later, it was instrumental in changing state law to allow for games of skill at Oaklawn, which led the way for legalized gambling in the state.
“The reason the firm has lasted so long is because of the integrity of its members,” said partner Beau Britton. “It has always been community driven and active and always stood on the right side of things.”
Former SBS partner Ray Smith, who died in 2007, a longtime member of the Arkansas House of Representatives and a former speaker, was the lone representative in 1957 to vote against a bill that allowed then-Gov. Orval Faubus to close schools in Pulaski County to prevent integration.
“Our legacy is longstanding, and it’s because of the people [like Smith] who were here before us,” Britton said.
The Wright Lindsey Jennings firm started out in 1900 as the legal department for the old Rock Island railroad in Little Rock. The firm now has 79 attorneys and, like many of its counterparts, an office in Northwest Arkansas.
“When the firm was first started, when a train hit a cow on the track or something, the attorneys would handle that,” said Stephen Lancaster, managing partner. The legal department soon morphed into its own independent firm but continued to do work for Rock Island until it went out of business in 1980. By then, the firm now known as WLJ was known throughout the region as a litigation firm.
“Throughout our history, we’ve been primarily a litigation firm,” Lancaster said. “We go to court, and we represent clients at trial. That’s still primarily the case, but we try to be a full-service firm, as well. So we’ve got people who have never seen the inside of a courtroom and don’t want to see the inside of a courtroom, but they’re great at handling transactions or intellectual property or bankruptcy or any number of things that our clients need us to do. So we try to be able to serve whatever their needs are.”
WLJ’s Quinten Whiteside, left, and Stephen Lancaster
lead a firm of 79 attorneys.
In addition to a long list of state, federal and appellate court judges, WLJ counts former President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor among its alumni. Clinton practiced at the firm in between terms as Arkansas governor in the early 1980s.
Another area in which Lancaster believes the firm has distinguished itself and has been far ahead of the curve is in the hiring, support and promotion of women and minorities.
“It’s important because it’s the right thing to do, but also from a business perspective,” he said. “We were the first large firm in Arkansas to make a female a partner. We were the first to make a black man a partner. We’ve continued to encourage that, and it’s something I’m very proud of.”
Innovation also has been a cornerstone of business for WLJ, from tech law to the firm’s growing and prominent sports law practice and even medical marijuana.
“We want to be innovative and recognize where growth is going and where our clients are,” said Quinten Whiteside, partner and the firm’s COO. “We’ve been a big supporter of The Venture Center, and the firm made a conscious decision that we were going to support our attorneys who had a passion for that.”
As a small firm in a small city, Britton and his colleagues at SBS know reputation goes a long way. The firm’s reputation was built by men like Don Schnipper, who practiced in Hot Springs for more than 50 years, and former longtime partner Philip Clay, both retired.
“When I was learning about the history of the firm, its legacy became important to me,” Britton said. “I wanted to be a part of the next generation to carry it forward.”
This applies to civic mindedness but also, simply, to the Golden Rule, Britton stressed.
“We’re not going to tell you what you want to hear. We’re going to tell you what you need to hear,” he said. “It’s hard to get into trouble if you’re communicating with your client. We strike a balance. Can we provide benefits to the client? If not, we’ll tell you. In today’s world, you have to be flexible, and we try to be true to our legacy.”
As with any business, longstanding firms earn that moniker by being flexible. Though law schools are churning out roughly the same number of graduates, Gardner said they emerge from law school with much different expectations from their employers than graduates did when he entered the workforce in the late 1980s.
“They’re motivated differently; money’s not a motivator anymore,” he said. “With my generation, you just worked hard for what you got, but now they’re weighing the incremental benefit for the additional effort.”
A recent glance at a firm letterhead from 20 years ago made an impression on Gardner.
“As far as the people on that letterhead that are still with the firm or retired from it, the retention rate was astronomical, like 95 percent-plus,” he said. “Then, looking at the lawyers who have joined the firm over the last 20 years, the turnover rate there is going in the opposite direction, and that’s not just us.”
Gardner noted that members of his and previous generations mostly worked for the same employers their entire careers or rarely went to another employer unless for a promotion. Today, the average person is expected to work for different employers, changing jobs every four to five years, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
One of the biggest changes of the last two decades, of course, was wrought by pandemic. Many COVID adjustments have stuck, including meetings and court proceedings by Zoom or another video platform. Like other firms, the Friday firm still has a voluntary remote working policy.
However, Gardner said the pendulum may be swinging back.
“I think what firms in the legal industry are finding is that if you go fully remote, you lose some of the training. You lose the culture. You’re not with the people you want to work with, learning more about them,” he said.
One of the advantages law firms have is strength in numbers.
“If you have a question or an issue, you’ve got somebody down the hall who knows how it’s done and can help you think through it,” he said. “That’s been a real strength here, the mentoring and training of our younger lawyers. It’s rewarding to see them turn the corner and start mentoring the next generation.”
Lancaster agreed that the next generation of lawyers is coming out of law school with different expectations.
“Like everyone else, we have seen people reevaluating what they want to do,” he said. “We have seen some difficulty in finding people who meet our needs. We’ve been able to do it, but it’s been a real struggle to find folks. Some find this is not what they want to do; it can be a stressful profession. There are demands on our time, whether it’s a trial or a closing, and we have to be here. I recognize that’s not for everybody, but thankfully, we’ve got a group of people who recognize and embrace that responsibility.”
Though rooted in history, the Rose firm also has adapted to the changing times.
“The No. 1 adjustment I see is the Zoom meetings, the prevalence of video conferencing,” Parnell said. “Five years ago, I had never done a video conference — maybe a Skype; it was so random. Now it’s a daily occurrence to have calendar invites sent through Teams. It’s just not going away.”
Demand for legal services increased dramatically after COVID hit, and though candidates may have emerged from law school with different expectations, Parnell said they were there for the taking. One expectation that will never change, he said, is the commitment of the firm’s attorneys to the legal profession.
“We saw that students were still going to law school, still interested in doing the type of work we’re doing,” Parnell said. “If anything, we are actually seeing better students and better candidates coming out of law school in the past five years than we did 10 years ago.”
Photos by Steve Lewis
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