Photo by Lori Sparkman
Whether Jamie Jones Walsworth chose law or it chose her, the Arkansas legal community is better off for the choice.
A Rogers native, Walsworth joined Little Rock’s venerable Friday, Eldredge & Clark firm after earning the highest score on the Arkansas bar exam in 2003. A partner in the firm’s litigation practice group and a member of its management committee, she was elected president of the Arkansas Bar Association earlier this year. Her curriculum vitae reads like a table of contents and might require a thumb drive to share.
Though she graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 2000 with an undergraduate degree in psychology, her path always led to law. The legal profession, she said, gave her a chance to combine two passions — critical thinking and service. After earning her Juris Doctor in 2003 from the University of Kansas, where she was managing editor of Kansas Law Review and a member of Order of the Coif, an honor society for American law school graduates, she was quickly snatched up by the Friday firm.
Walsworth said she was ready to return home and begin honing her craft in courtrooms.
“Law gave me the chance to combine critical thinking with service. Litigation fit me because it’s dynamic and keeps you on your toes,” she said. “After law school, I went into litigation because I enjoy solving tough problems. When I first started practicing, I thought litigation would be all courtroom drama — but pretty quickly, I learned it’s really about preparation, patience and people skills. The drama is rare, but relationships and problem-solving are constant, and that’s what hooked me. It is not about being the smartest person in the room but about being the hardest worker and most prepared.”
Satisfaction comes from becoming a specialist in a specific subject matter and then breaking it down for a jury, she added.
“Ultimately, a trial is a problem that we are asking the jury to solve, and as the attorney, I have to be able to break down the problem so that the jury comes to the solution favorable to my client’s position,” she said. “That is fun to do, and I actually enjoy the time it takes to learn the case and prepare for the trial.”
For Walsworth, it was litigation or bust.
“I did not consider any other specialties. In fact, when I was hired by the Friday firm, I called to make sure I was hired for litigation,” she said. “Buddy Sutton, the managing partner at the time, assured me that no one wanted me doing math — to my great relief.”
The inclination to community service set her up for success in the legal field, she said. After all, that hefty CV reveals numerous national awards, service on multiple national professional associations, inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America, and local volunteerism from Junior League of Little Rock to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock.
Walsworth said community leadership taught her to listen, build consensus and lead with empathy — skills that directly translate into guiding clients through complex litigation.
“What is probably most important about my background is that I learned early on the importance of community,” Walsworth said. “I was not raised with a lot of opportunities, but I was raised in a community which awarded hard work with opportunities and invested in me for whatever reason. Service and connections to your community is my most important lesson growing up and the backbone of my background.”
Launching her practice back home in Arkansas was an easy choice. Few places embody community as much as the Natural State, where perfect strangers can meet and, within minutes, find connections. Little Rock, a city of more than 200,000 anchoring a metro of roughly 750,000, has been called the biggest small town in America because of all those connections.
“This is home,” Walsworth said. “One thing I love about practicing here is that it feels like a small town even in the big cases. You know the lawyers, the judges, the clients. You’re really part of a community, and that makes the work meaningful. Coming back to Arkansas to invest in the community that believed in me was important.”
Balancing those legal scales with the human element represents the most challenging aspect of what she does, Walsworth said. Each case involves real people — businesses, families and individuals — and the stakes are often very high, she added.
Law, after all, is a service profession. Most of the time, those who hire a lawyer are not doing so as the result of good news.
“Keeping that perspective while managing the demands of the work is always a challenge,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just about being the person in your client’s corner, reminding them that someone is fighting for them and that they’re not alone. We’re there when people face some of their toughest moments, whether that’s a business crisis, a family dispute or a nonprofit trying to serve the community. All lawyers have had clients say, ‘I just need someone in my corner,’ and that’s what we do as lawyers — we stand with clients when they face something they can’t handle alone.”
Serving as an advocate for their clients is just one component to an attorney’s job. Lawyers also serve to protect the rule of law, and democratic, functional societies cannot operate without it.
“The rule of law establishes the norms of behavior for government and its citizens,” Walsworth said. “Lawyers, no matter what type of law they practice, play an important role of ensuring the process works. This is pivotal in protecting democracy for all Americans.”
Despite the pop-culture image of TV and movie lawyers battling it out in a courtroom with lives on the line, the stigma is overblown, she said. Drama, of course, is inherent to the industry on the criminal side, but otherwise, the drama often involves counselors simply trying to find the best solution for all parties.
“Most people think of lawyers as adversarial, but in reality, a lot of our work is collaborative,” Walsworth said. “Even in litigation, much of what we do is negotiating, problem-solving and finding common ground. I’ve had cases where we were fierce advocates in court all day, then had dinner with opposing counsel that evening. At the end of the day, it is about respect and professionalism, not personal battles.
“What we do for a living is challenging — intellectually, time consuming — and civility and connections matter greatly,” she said.
Most of Walsworth’s work looks nothing like what consumers see depicted on the screen, silver or otherwise. LR law, it turns out, looks a lot different than L.A. Law.
“It’s not nearly as dramatic as TV,” she said. “Investigations are mostly careful, detailed work — digging through records, interviewing witnesses and connecting the dots. It’s really like putting together a massive jigsaw puzzle with a thousand missing pieces. The big dramatic reveals you see on TV are rare, but when the picture finally comes together, it’s incredibly satisfying.”
Walsworth does not have a “private investigator Friday” like Perry Mason’s Paul Drake at her disposal, but she gave credit to her in-house team of colleagues and experts.
“It’s very much a team effort,” she said.
There is a reason why famous movie stars do not often portray tax or probate attorneys, after all. The legal “action,” the climactic battle scene, when it is there to be had, usually takes place in the courtroom — but is there an art to litigation? Can it be effectively learned?
“Litigation is about strategy, and a good strategist is both artist and scientist,” Walsworth said. “Litigation strategy can be learned, but the love for litigation is one that you either have or don’t have.”
These days, lawyers must adapt with changing times more quickly than ever before. The legal industry has evolved in many ways since Walsworth began practicing in 2003.
She cited three main aspects of the industry that have changed over her 20-plus years on the job: risk assessments, which changed civil litigation and resulted in settlements being more common than trials; advances in technology, which have revolutionized the practice of law; and, of course, COVID-19, which changed how everyone communicates, she said.
“Artificial intelligence, in particular, will have very real consequences to how we analyze and assess cases,” Walsworth said. “Lawyers will have to keep up with the technology and become good, prompt engineers.”
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