Forward Together

Megan Beck started practicing family law in 2005. Since then, relationship-building has become more important than ever. “Legal knowledge is obviously a very integral component, but how you are able to work with other people is just as important, regardless of the kind of law that you’re in, whether it’s contracts, estate planning or litigating a big case,” she says. “All you’re doing is trying to make a deal, and if you don’t have the interpersonal skills to do that, you’re not going to succeed.”

In this 20th anniversary edition of Oklahoma Super Lawyers, four attorneys who have been in law for two decades reflect on how their practices have changed, what they’ve learned, and what they hope the future brings for the profession.

Chosen Career

Malcolm Savage, Savage Law Office; Criminal Defense; Oklahoma City: I’m from East Texas and there were a couple lawyers representing criminal cases. The time and effort that they put into defending poor people just really made me want to be a lawyer. I’d go to the courthouse sometimes because I had family members who had been in trouble, and these lawyers were defending them. At that point, I said, “This is what I want to do with my life.”

Megan Beck, Megan M. Beck, PLLC; Family Law; Tulsa: When I was a kid, my peers wanted to be either doctors or lawyers, and I knew, straight out of the gate, that medicine was not for me. So I decided in high school that I wanted to be an attorney.

Kenyatta Bethea, Holloway, Bethea & Others; Civil Litigation; Oklahoma City: My parents—neither one of them have a college degree. My mom was a homemaker. My dad worked at Goodyear in Topeka. He was a laborer and lived a pretty impoverished life. There was just always this need in the community to help people.

Alyssa Campbell, Campbell Law Office; Family Law, Native American Law; Stillwater: My dad was a family law attorney and my mom was the legal secretary. My dad took us on a field trip to the courthouse for my third-grade class and we got to go sit in the courtroom and do a tour of it. I fell in love with the law that day.

The Right Fit

Beck: I really liked the human component of [family law]. I felt like it was the area where I could use my interpersonal skills the best—talking to people, helping them solve problems. Family law also spans a lot of different areas. Because I practice divorce, I have to know some real estate law, tax law, estate planning. It never gets boring.

Savage: I was an intern, after my first year in law school, with a federal district judge. She knew I was interested in criminal law, so she set me up with the Oklahoma County public defender’s office, and I worked there for four years before going into private practice. One of the big district court judges in Oklahoma County died, and Gov. Brad Henry appointed me to that position. And after that, I went back into private practice, and I’ve been there ever since.

Bethea: I had an offer to work at the public defender’s office, and then had an offer to work at a civil law firm that I had interned in. I chose the civil litigation. I spend more time now helping a lot of poor people, who wouldn’t be able to get representation otherwise.

Campbell: I did not end up in the practice of law that I thought I was going to when I started law school, but I definitely think I’m where I’m supposed to be now. I thought I would be similar to my dad, but I also thought at one point that I might go work for a government agency. And instead, I ended up taking federal Indian law, enjoyed the class, and ended up getting a job in Indian country. And I have been here now for 20 years.

Ch-ch-changes

Savage: When I first started, most of my clients were people who had multiple felony convictions. Back then, even on things like larceny or simple drug crimes, the range of punishment with two or more prior convictions was 20 years to life. Over time, Oklahoma, while not a liberal state by any means, has done a lot with sentencing reform. The ranges of punishments are much lower, and you can divert people into programs rather than incarceration. I also think there’s been a dramatic change as far as judges. We have a lot of younger district judges, female district judges, and more minority judges.

Campbell: COVID really forced Oklahoma courts to upgrade their technologies. They used to bring all of the defendants upstairs and arraign them. Now they can do it virtually from the jails. In my realm, Native American law has continued to progress as tribes have become more progressive, more involved in economic development. Supreme Court law has really changed with the passing of the McGirt case that reinforced tribal sovereignty and criminal jurisdiction in Indian country in 2020.

Beck: Everything has changed as a result of COVID. We are much more efficient because we’ve realized that we don’t have to go to court to get things accomplished. I also think, however, that civility has taken a hit because it’s easy for people to take an uncivil tone or approach when they don’t have to face the person that they’re being hateful to. Today, I was at the courthouse and I didn’t see another lawyer walking around the family law floor, not one. It’s like a ghost town.

Bethea: Here in Oklahoma, since about 2002, they have continued to pass a series of tort reform measures that are basically stripping Oklahomans of their rights. [It’s more difficult] trying to find a way to get people just results.

“The” Case

Bethea: I had a medical malpractice case against a general surgeon who had performed a gallbladder removal and injured [the patient]. From the outset, she appeared to be struggling with life, which is not uncommon for a lot of my clients. I dug deeper and discovered her son was killed in Iraq while he was fighting for our country. When we filed a suit against the Indian hospital in question, I was actually suing the federal government because Indian Health Service [matters are litigated by] the Department of Justice. Ultimately, we settled the case.

Campbell: My most memorable case is an adoption case. The tribe I was working for, and the law firm I was working for, banded together to work in conjunction with a lawyer in South Carolina. We were able to get the child returned to Oklahoma, and ultimately the child was reunified with tribal family members, and we strengthened Indian Child Welfare Act enforcement in Oklahoma. It was probably the most impactful case for that particular area of law at the time.

Beck: About 10 years ago, I started helping a client who was facing the possibility of not seeing his child for a number of years due to an erroneously entered order. By the time I finished with him three years later, he had his child nearly half the time, shared joint legal custody, and was able to move on with a successful co-parenting situation. That was one where I was able to use my skills to reunite a family and help a couple of parents work together when, at the beginning of the case, it was completely unthinkable by both of them.

Savage: One that tugged at my heart was a case in Caddo County, where my client was from California and was stopped, along with another person in the vehicle, for trafficking marijuana. When I first met the defendant, something just wasn’t clicking. His brother explained that he was autistic and had delays and a learning disability. I was certain he had no idea what the other person had in that vehicle. Most defense lawyers will tell you: Don’t put your clients on the stand at a jury trial, but I knew that if I put that guy on the stand, and the jurors heard him, they would realize that there was something different about him. So I put him on the stand, and he told his story. By the time I walked across the street to a restaurant to wait for the verdict to come back, I received a call that the verdict was in. They had found him not guilty. Right in court, I cried. I still stay in contact with him, and every time I think about that case, I get goosebumps.

Lessons Learned

Savage: Court clerks, court reporters, bailiffs are just as important as the judge. You need to treat them with respect, in a professional manner, and show them how important they are to the administration of justice. I have court clerks and bailiffs tell me all the time that they appreciate the fact that I notice them. I also think that, as criminal defense lawyers, we have to realize that prosecutors have a job to do, just like we do. They’re not the enemy.

Beck: I can think back to times where I’m not really proud of my own behavior, or when I’ve been treated poorly or had an unsuccessful outcome in a case. You learn from your mistakes, from your failures, from your harder times. You don’t want to be the person that, when your opposing counsel learns that you’re on the case, they roll their eyes like, “Oh, not so-and-so.”

Campbell: I really try to invest in up-and-coming lawyers. Those are going to be our future peers and we want them to have the same passion we do for the law. And I think that treating your peers and your co-counsel and your opposing counsel professionally is probably the greatest skillset you can have. If you don’t build those relationships, you’re out there on an island all by yourself.

Future Worries

Beck: We live in a time when people are just really mean, and there are no consequences for it. I’m concerned that that’s going to impact, in a very negative way, how families heal from the divorce process and custody cases. It’s really hard to repair the damage once it occurs.

Savage: I’m concerned that we don’t put enough resources into the indigent defense system. I think they’re very understaffed and underfunded. I hope our legislators, at some point, wake up and realize that. A second, and maybe equally important, concern is that our mental health system in Oklahoma, overall, is broken. When you’re waiting months or years for a defendant who has been found to be incompetent to get to a hospital for treatment, that’s unconscionable.

Campbell: If lawyers are using AI, you need to be double-checking your sources because not everything AI spits out is actually the law. I have clients who bring it in and ask me about it, and I’m like, “Well, that’s half true.”

Bethea: It appears as though our basic foundation is being eroded. As an attorney, we’re sworn to make sure the rule of law is the primary focus and that comes above our own self-interests. As we erect concentration camps and deport individuals who are legal residents of the United States, that’s first and foremost in my mind.

High Hopes

Campbell: I hope that we reinvest in the community, as a whole, to encourage younger people to go to law school, but I also hope that they find a passion for it. The tribes that I work with—every service that I provide for them is going to help a business or an enterprise. The tribe’s income goes to provide shoes for a little girl. It goes to provide a college scholarship for a high school graduate. It helps them get into trade school.

Beck: I hope that we can take what we’ve learned in the last five years in terms of efficiency and effectiveness and use that to continue to build on those two things over the course of the next several years. I also hope that things turn around in terms of the way professionals counsel their clients to treat others, because right now there’s a lot of negativity everywhere you look.

Savage: I hope that we continue to offer more alternative sentencing programs and treatment programs. And I hope that we continue to have more minority students become lawyers. Many of our defendants who come through the system are minorities, and they say to me, all the time, “I wish there were more Black lawyers. I wish there were more Hispanic lawyers.” I think they would view the system as being more fair and equitable if they saw more people that looked like them working in the system.

Bethea: I would hope that everything that is going on would motivate people to return back to what we’ve seen in past generations, and that is a focus on taking care of each other.