‘An Exciting Time to Be a Young Lawyer’

These five attorneys all began practicing around the time Mid-South Super Lawyers magazine was first published in 2006. During that time they’ve seen some changes.

Technology, of course, is one of the biggest. When Clarence Webster III, a civil defense litigator in Jackson, Mississippi, started out, he says, “There was a lot of time spent on airplanes, going to different meetings that might last 30 minutes to an hour. Now we use virtual means to communicate with each other.”

Here’s a look back—and a look ahead.

Why Law?

Susan Han, Nettles Han Law; Civil Litigation; Birmingham, Alabama: Both of my parents were lawyers. They always told me I should be a lawyer because of my inquisitive nature and love of a good debate. Of course, I studied music instead—but I ultimately turned toward the law.

Alex Little, Litson; Criminal Defense: White Collar; Nashville, Tennessee: When I came out of college, I wanted to work in international affairs and diplomacy. My first job was working for former President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center. I was very fortunate to get to run around the world following him, working on peace negotiations. I wrote my first peace agreement at 22. It was fascinating work, and at the time I wanted to continue doing that. A lot of people I was dealing with had law degrees, so I thought, “OK, let’s go to law school.”

Rebecca Hurst, Smith Hurst; Estate Planning; Rogers, Arkansas: I took a business law class in high school after I dropped out of calculus, and I just really fell in love with it. I ended up getting an accounting degree in undergrad, thinking as a practicality that if I don’t go to law school right away I’d be able to get a job. I worked for about 18 months as an accountant and realized that was not the path for me.

Clarence Webster III, Jones Walker; Civil Litigation: Defense; Jackson, Mississippi: I wanted to be a lawyer from a very early age. I liked performing. I liked the arguing. I liked the public speaking part. I did high school speech and debate, then went to college and continued to do that, got involved with student government, and I was a political science major. So it seems like my entire education was geared toward the practice of law.

Sara Williams, Singleton Schreiber; Personal Injury – General: Plaintiff; Birmingham, Alabama: I was an English lit major who didn’t want to go into teaching, and the only thing that I thought I could use my skill set for was practicing law.

My first job out of law school was in an insurance defense firm. I did civil defense at various firms for seven years and realized that my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was with people.

Why This Practice Area?

Hurst: Honestly, my big dream was to be the corporate counsel for the St. Louis Cardinals. When I started writing my law review article, I picked a topic that I thought was going to be business-related—family limited partnerships—not knowing that that couldn’t be more in the middle of estate planning if I’d tried. 

Little: At Georgetown, I was reading the paper and saw that the International Criminal Court, which was just started, had opened its first investigation into the Lord’s Resistance Army and war crimes by this rebel group that had operated in South Sudan and northern Uganda. I found myself as the first intern at the International Criminal Court for the prosecutor. When I left government work, the former U.S. attorney who asked me to come work with him had been a defense attorney doing white-collar work for 30 years. He was well-known for it. It was a natural fit.

Han: I was offered a job by the labor and employment practice group with Balch & Bingham and was asked to work on real estate cases and was given a lot of personal autonomy in that area. I found it really stimulating to work in two completely different practice areas—and I still have a mix of cases. In 2015, a friend asked me to join Red Mountain Law Group, an association of primarily single-member LLCs that share office space, overhead and referrals. It took me about 10 months to get the courage to move from the security of a large firm but I eventually made the change. It was the best move for me.

Webster: I knew I wanted to litigate because I enjoy the performative part of practicing law. After clerking for a number of firms, I found that being on the defense side was more in line with my personality and skill set.

Williams: My first job out of law school was in an insurance defense firm. I did civil defense at various firms for seven years and realized that my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was with people. I had the opportunity in 2013 to join Alex [Shunnarah’s] firm, and that’s when I figured out that personal injury plaintiff work was what I was meant to do.

20 Years of Change

Little: There’s a lot less confidence in lawyers and judges than there was 20 years ago. Whether it’s clients, juries or the public, I don’t think that people trust us as much, and that is ultimately to everyone’s detriment.

Williams: We are trending into a more restrictive practice of law that is not going to be good for people. We’re seeing a lot of tort reform. We’re seeing fewer restrictions on arbitration, more enforcement of arbitration and damages caps. To me, the beauty of a jury trial is that it is a community saying, “This is how we as a community value what this person has lost.”

Hurst: There’s more flexibility and mobility in the practice of law now. Some of that is just because of technology, but we all ended up doing that through COVID, where we realized that you could pretty much work anywhere, anytime. Since COVID, especially, everybody is on 24/7. You’re always available.

Han: There are certainly more communications via email or text messages, even with clients and opposing counsel. And with the advancements in artificial intelligence, a lot of people are using AI resources. Some are more reliable than others, but it certainly speeds up the amount of time that an attorney might need to spend researching a certain matter.

Webster: Participation in bar activities has gone down significantly. That’s definitely been the case here in Jackson, where our local Bar has struggled to maintain its membership. And civility has taken a hit.

That Memorable Case

Han: One of my favorite cases was a jury trial in the Bessemer Division of Jefferson County Circuit Court. My clients had a neighbor block their access to their river home, and they were defending a claim of trespass, counterclaimed with a claim of trespass and a prescriptive easement to their property. The jury found in favor of my client, and the sole question they asked the judge during deliberations was whether they could award attorney’s fees to my clients. 

Webster: It involved some very nice people getting swindled in a real estate deal where they bought a bunch of properties that turned out to be lemons. They ended up buying slums. We ended up taking the case to trial and we actually lost a large portion of the case. But the client sent me the nicest letter thanking me and the other team members for the work we did—that we had done a good job of preparing him for a potential adverse ruling and he was appreciative of the work. He also gave me the Book of Mormon. I still have that book on my bookshelf.

Little: I represented a man whose family came to me when his case was before the Tennessee Supreme Court. He was, they said, innocent, and at that point he had been serving 10 years in jail, had won a collateral attack on his sentence for ineffective assistance, and the appeals court had reversed and sent him back to jail. The family was fairly desperate to get help. We learned that there was a fingerprint that could only have been left by the person who committed the murder, by another individual who, it turned out, had also killed a police officer very shortly after this murder. We were able to prove to the court that this other person was, in fact, the murderer, and my client got released from jail after 13 years. Within another year, we were able to convince the governor and the parole board to exonerate him.

Williams: My largest verdict to date was a case that really changed the way I approach proving damages—and cases in general. It was a bus wreck case involving a client whose leg was amputated up to the knee. The biggest thing she wanted was for the jury to understand what she had gone through—not necessarily feel sorry for her.

Hurst: In 2009, I had a financial planner contact our office and say they had a client who needed to have a family limited partnership set up for them. It’s this little old lady—I think she was 88 at the time—and I started talking to her about her assets. She said she’s got a house worth about $100,000, she’s got some property over in a small rural area of the state. And oh, by the way, she owns a block on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her father had ground-leased a piece of property when he was young to this developer, who had put in a shopping center. For whatever reason, the people who put in the building forgot to renew the ground lease, so it reverted to her as the successor owner. It was worth tens of millions. I still work with her children.

The Learning Curve

Webster: This is a customer service industry. Clients expect quality service and they expect responsiveness, and they don’t want to hear a lot of excuses. Being a lawyer is a lot more than just the day-to-day reading, writing, going-to-court part of practicing. You have to be a counselor, an adviser and overall, a good vendor for your clients.

Little: People are much more complicated than we like to give them credit for—in good ways and bad. I think that’s true with clients, opposing counsel, judges. You have to recognize that the people you’re dealing with are very multifaceted and have all sorts of personalities, motivations, strengths and weaknesses. 

Hurst: Northwest Arkansas is full of entrepreneurial spirit, which we see personified through the Waltons and Walmart, and Tyson and J.B. Hunt. It is extremely contagious, and that is one of the reasons we felt we wanted to go out and start our own firm. Also, nothing comes without hard work. You’ve really got to put in the effort to be successful for your clients and in your life.

Williams: The greatest asset that we can be to our clients is to be human—versus what I think they try to instill in us in law school, and that is to be cold and objective and to remove our emotions from what we do. As I open myself up to being vulnerable and understand both sides of every case, I have better results.

Han: One of the things that I love about some of the matters I have in smaller counties is that they still have docket calls, where attorneys all meet at 9 a.m. to wait for the status conference or have a motion heard by a judge. Sometimes there are 25, 30 attorneys at the courthouse, just waiting to go before the judge. I find that, whether it’s me meeting with opposing counsel, or individual parties in a case, you often can get matters resolved in person. We’re all human, we all have different perspectives, and in-person contact can go a long way.

The Future

Hurst: If you look at the headlines, there’s so much tension and polar opposites, and nobody wants to try to work together. I hope that attorneys, in general, continue to see the practice of law as a respectable profession and be facilitators rather than adversaries.

Webster: As the legal market has changed, there are a lot more opportunities for young lawyers to do more substantive work earlier in their career. It’s no longer the days where you spend your first two to three years carrying the briefcase or doing document review. Our younger lawyers are drafting complex motions and going to arguments and doing depositions. 

Han: There are a lot of pressures that can come with the practice of law, and the statistics related to substance abuse and mental health challenges for attorneys can be quite grim. I would hope that the next generation of attorneys incorporates more of a focus on health and wellness in their lives.

Williams: My biggest concerns would be tort reform and the divestment of the community’s voice from the legal process. … Tort reform only benefits corporations. It doesn’t benefit the people, but is sold as a thing that benefits communities.

Little: It is absolutely a pivotal point for the country and for the profession of law, whether you’re talking about AI, or politics, or how we create a new age of being a lawyer in this digital world. It’s an exciting time to be a young lawyer, if you come into it eyes wide open.