As Phillips Murrah celebrates 40 years of service, we are highlighting the people whose work has helped shape the firm along the way. In this 40 for 40 profile, we spotlight Lyndon Whitmire and the perspective he brings to his role and to the firm’s culture.
Lyndon celebrated his 30th year at Phillips Murrah this past January, and he has never practiced anywhere else. He joined the firm in January of 1996, straight out of law school, and today he is the longest-serving attorney at Phillips Murrah who was hired as an associate. Over three decades, he has watched the firm change from the inside, beginning with his own early years as a young litigation associate.
His path to the firm began the summer before his third year of law school, when he clerked at two firms, one in Texas and one in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma City firm did not last, which left him without an offer. He interviewed with Tom Wolfe and others at Phillips Murrah, worked his way through a competitive series of interviews, and was ultimately hired. He simply stayed.
Two experiences stand out as shaping his professional path. The first came in May of 1998, when Tom Wolfe called from an airport and asked whether Lyndon would like to help with a document review in Washington, DC. The assignment was supposed to last about four weeks, flying out on Sunday and returning on Thursday. Lyndon thought it sounded cool, and he said yes. When the four weeks ended, he was asked to come back, and over roughly two and a half years he made the trip to Washington dozens of times. That work introduced him to his closest friends in the legal world outside of Oklahoma, and many of them went on to become the greater part of his client base.
The second experience grew directly out of the first. One of those friends, then serving as in-house counsel for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, called to ask whether Lyndon would handle Oklahoma in the Accutane litigation. Thousands of cases had been filed in New Jersey, with plaintiffs alleging the drug caused inflammatory bowel disease, and the court was moving them forward in waves. Handling Oklahoma meant deposing the plaintiffs, their family members, the dermatologists who prescribed the drug, and the gastroenterologists who made the diagnoses. Lyndon said yes, and Oklahoma soon became Colorado, Arkansas, and New Mexico as well. Those four states were exclusively his. The work lasted about three and a half years and remains, by far, the biggest origination of his career.
Lyndon has seen the firm move from the formal, hard-driving days of his early years as an associate to the firm it is today, which he describes as significantly different. He credits much of that change to the founders and early leaders, and he singles out Tom Wolfe, a true standout in the profession and one of the most humble people he knows.
Having watched the firm evolve, Lyndon points to one constant: the firm guards its culture. Good legal work is a given, and he considers it a baseline rather than a distinction. What sets Phillips Murrah apart is that its people genuinely enjoy one another, have each other’s backs, and do not take themselves too seriously. For the firm’s attorneys, he says, identity is not wrapped up in being a lawyer. It is found in family, hobbies, and faith.
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