Forty years ago, five attorneys set out to build a different kind of law firm. Phillips Murrah is the result.
In the above video: Founding Partners Mel McVay, Mark Lovelace, and Kristen Juras reflect on launching Phillips Murrah 40 years ago, alongside Shareholder Michele Spillman and, in archival footage, late Founder Bob Sheets.
A Promising Firm and a Persistent Question
In 1986, five attorneys at a well-regarded Oklahoma City law firm began asking themselves a question that would change the course of their careers. What if they could build something better together?
The firm they were considering leaving was not a bad place to practice law. The clients were sophisticated, the work was substantive, and the experience the young attorneys had gained there was genuinely valuable. It gave them real autonomy and helped build their confidence. Melvin R. McVay, Jr., one of the five Founding Partners of the firm now named Phillips Murrah, acknowledged as much, but despite the quality of the work, something essential was missing. The culture inside the firm did not reflect who these five attorneys were or how they naturally worked.
“It lacked the culture, the camaraderie, the collegiality,” McVay said. Decisions felt territorial and advancement felt self-serving. As late founding partner Robert N. Sheets, the only one in the group who had already made shareholder at the time, described it: the atmosphere was “every man for himself.”
“Fortunately, one of us had made partner,” recalled founding partner J. Mark Lovelace, “and he offered insights of what that side was like, and it was like, ‘well, maybe we can do better than that.'”
That disconnect planted a seed.
“We had a strong desire to do something different,” McVay said, “and I think we recognized that we had the opportunity to make that happen.”
Lovelace put it plainly: “We learned lessons from what we didn’t want to be, which was very top down and not particularly a great opportunity for attorneys our age.”
The Right People at the Right Time
What made the idea of leaving feel less like a gamble and more like a logical next step was the particular combination of people involved. The five attorneys, McVay, Lovelace, Sheets, Kristen Juras, and Keith McFall, were roughly the same age and at similar stages in their careers. They were mostly four-year attorneys with young families and client relationships already taking shape. Their practices complemented one another across a wide range of legal disciplines, and they understood they could serve clients together in ways none of them could alone. And perhaps most importantly, they trusted each other completely.
“We were friends. We respected one another,” recalled Founding Partner Kristen Juras. “One of our common goals was to provide excellent service to our clients and not allow territory or personal goals to interfere with working together as a team.”
Juras’ time with the new firm was brief but very formative. She had come to Oklahoma City with her husband, an Air Force officer stationed at Tinker Air Force Base, and brought legal expertise in tax, business formation, and estate planning that fit naturally into the group forming around this shared idea. Several years after starting the firm, Juras moved with her family back to her home state of Montana, where she has since built a distinguished career culminating in her current role as Lieutenant Governor.
Once momentum began to build, it became self-reinforcing. McVay described a potential obstacle, the financing question, as the one genuine uncertainty. Could five attorneys with modest savings and young families secure the funding needed to launch a new firm? When the answer turned out to be yes, it felt like confirmation.
“That really pretty much iced the cake, at that point, as far as going forward,” McVay remembered. “At that point, in hindsight, you almost think that the sun and the moon and the stars lined up.”
Building the Culture They Wanted
The newly formed firm opened its doors in the Columbus Square office building in 1986 with a clear sense of who they were and how they intended to work. The culture the Founders built emerged naturally as a reflection of their personalities and preferences: collaborative by instinct, loyal to each other by habit, and committed to the idea that the firm’s success belonged to everyone.
“We just had to be open and candid with each other about what was going on,” Lovelace said. “Otherwise, the firm couldn’t possibly have grown and worked through early struggles and, frankly, learning how to run a small business, because that’s what we were. It just happened to be a law firm.”
From the beginning, decisions were made by consensus rather than by vote or seniority. Partners covered for each other when circumstance demanded it. Clients were understood to belong to the firm, not to individual attorneys, meaning each client had access to the full range of experience under one roof. When it came time to bring new people in, personality and cultural fit carried as much weight as credentials.
“It’s amazing how much you can get done when you don’t care who gets the credit, and that’s what happened with us,” Juras said. “We were more focused on providing excellent legal services to our clients than any one particular person getting the credit for it.”
Nurturing and maintaining that culture as the firm grew became an ongoing priority. McVay emphasized that to grow the firm and enjoy continued success, that culture needed to permeate the organization starting at the top.
“If you don’t have that collegiality and camaraderie at the top, it’s never going to flow through to the associates or the staff,” he said.
That philosophy has guided every hiring decision and every partnership promotion the firm has made over four decades.
Forty Years On
Since its founding, Phillips Murrah’s positive workplace culture has carried across both generations and geography. Shareholder Michele C. Spillman joined Phillips Murrah six years ago in the firm’s Dallas office, which opened in 2018. She has worked at other firms, which gives her a useful point of comparison. What she found at Phillips Murrah was something she had not always experienced elsewhere.
“A lot of us, me included, have worked at other firms where there was a negative workplace culture,” Spillman said. “But for the last six years at Phillips Murrah, I have really seen the benefits of a healthy workplace culture that was created and implemented starting forty years ago.”
She said those benefits are visible at every level of the firm. Leadership is transparent and communication is open. There is a genuine sense of shared purpose rather than competing agendas. People care about each other professionally and personally and want to see each other succeed. The result is a firm that attracts and retains top talent, which ultimately benefits the people who matter most: the clients. Phillips Murrah, Spillman said, is a great place to work.
Lovelace notes with some wonder that the younger partners across both offices simply “seem to get it,” as if the values have been absorbed rather than taught. McVay’s explanation is more direct: culture is a reflection of the people you bring in. Hire for it consistently, and it sustains itself.
Today, Phillips Murrah is a majority women-owned firm, with women holding top firm leadership positions including Managing Partner, a milestone that traces back to the values of its founding. Juras, the only woman among the five Founders, says she was never treated as anything other than an equal from day one. The firm has simply continued to attract and elevate people who reflect that same spirit.
“They all had the highest respect,” Juras said. “Many of them were married to professional women or had family members who were professional women, and they were absolutely supportive of the women in the office. I am so proud of the success that they have worked hard to achieve over the past forty years.”
Forty years is a long time for any organization to hold onto its founding values. Phillips Murrah has, and the people who work there will confirm that it is no accident. It is the result of deliberate choices made in 1986 by five attorneys who decided that the way a firm treats its people is as important as the quality of its work. That choice has shaped every decision the firm has made since.
As Lovelace puts it with characteristic understatement: “It worked out quite well. I just don’t think we could have seen that it would work out as well as it has.”
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