Phillips Murrah embraces continuous change while our core mission of unrivaled legal services remains the same.
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In the above video: Phillips Murrah Directors Tom Wolfe, Terry Hawkins, Clay Ketter, Phoebe Barber, Kelsey Chilcoat, Mark Hornbeek, and Kayla Kuri discuss cultural and technological shifts in the legal industry over the last 40 years.
When Phillips Murrah was founded forty years ago, the practice of law was anchored by sheer physical friction. When documents couldn’t be delivered by hand, they were often sent by regular mail, creating a built-in three-day lag time before an attorney would hear back from opposing counsel. There was no e-filing, no remote work, and no expectation of instant availability. The environment was characterized by heavy, dark wooden furniture, physical law libraries, and an inherently slower, asynchronous pace.
But slowly, then seemingly all at once, that physical friction evaporated. The transition is perfectly captured by Director and former Managing Partner Tom Wolfe’s 2002 discovery of the Blackberry device while taking a deposition with another attorney. He noticed during testimony that the other attorney was doing something with her thumbs on a little device he described as the “size of a garage door opener.”
“I was slightly suspicious that someone was doing something they shouldn’t have been doing,” Tom said. “So I asked her, ‘What is it that you’re doing over there with your thumbs?’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m sending emails.'” Astounded by what he had seen, Tom returned to Phillips Murrah and sent a now-classic 2002 internal email:
While the Blackberry is no longer the newest technology, it marked the beginning of a profound professional and psychological shift within the legal field. It eliminated traditional workday boundaries and altered client expectations. As technology improved and connectivity increased, attorneys effectively became available all the time and capable of working from anywhere, even while on vacation.
“You can literally work anywhere now, which is good because I travel a lot,” said Director Clay Ketter. “I’ve got to work while I’m on vacation, usually, but I like that. The alternative would be that I don’t get to travel, or maybe I take one trip a year.”
However, the flexibility of working remotely is a plus-minus proposition, as Tom observed. “The plus is that, if you have obligations at home, you can manage to juggle work and family life quite a bit better than you could before.” The downside is, particularly with younger attorneys, they can often “miss out on the culture and learning experience that comes with working with attorneys that have more experience than they do.”
For Phillips Murrah’s younger generations of Directors, the “always on” culture transition had already begun when they entered law. Some were among the last law students taught how to research physical books in dedicated libraries. When others entered law school, it was already fully digital.
“My law school class was actually the first fully digital law school class at OU,” Director Mark Hornbeek said. “We had a law library, but it was a quiet place to study and not someplace you would actually go and do research.”
These days, being fully digital is the baseline reality of everyone’s legal careers, especially since the Covid shutdown forced full tech buy-in. The profession operates at the speed of light, and attorneys can now office from wherever they place their laptop, or even from their pockets as they travel.
Change is simply par for the course. Today, everyone is experiencing the next great technological leap together: Artificial Intelligence. The same way books and libraries were replaced by screens and search bars, the nature of search itself is changing as attorneys are able to perform research in minutes that used to take hours. Sophisticated, legal-specific AI-enabled tools like Everlaw and Westlaw’s Co-Counsel allow attorneys to use natural language queries to parse an almost-infinite amount of case documents in minutes.
“If I have a case that has 100,000 documents, but I know that I’m looking for a few documents with a few key words, I can type it into Everlaw and it will spit it out to me in less than 5 seconds,” Director Phoebe Barber said.
Far from replacing attorneys, this technology highlights their true value. As Director Kelsey Chilcoat noted, she consistently experiences moments where she thinks, “AI could not do that.”
AI can draft a contract clause, but it cannot draw on personal experience and relationships, nor nuanced knowledge of opposing counsel, venues, and judges to answer a client’s complex legal strategy questions. “Those are just elements that AI will never have,” Kelsey said.
Over the last four decades, the dark wood atmosphere and the necessity of being physically in the office have vanished. But while that has changed, fundamental aspects of the practice of law and the firm’s core mission remain unchanged.
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