What started out as an informal friendship turned into a real-life partnership, with two of Oklahoma’s premier insurance coverage and litigation defense teams joining forces this year.

In today’s increasingly litigious environment, our distinctive, thoughtful approach to defending insurance companies stands out.

Video transcript:
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Bill Leach: We have a litigation group here that concentrates on insurance issues, which would include contractual and non-contractual exposures, assisting clients with regulatory compliance, helping them understand what policy language means and how it may be interpreted differently in Oklahoma from other states.  I think most recently, the addition of new lawyers to this group has put us in a position to, I think, certainly be the largest, and in my opinion, the most experienced group of insurance coverage and extra-contractual lawyers in the state, probably the region.

Phil Richards: Because we have really focused our practice on bad faith defense and coverage litigation, as well as advising on coverage, we have been able to develop some techniques that aren’t generally used by other firms in terms of trying to diffuse that environment of lawsuits where an insurance company is the defendant. My philosophy in defending any lawsuit, but particularly in defending an insurance company, whether before the bench or a jury, is that the factfinder is going to see a lot more of me during the course of the trial.  They’re going to hear me speak a lot more than they are any individual witness from the insurance company.  And so how I comport myself in trial is, in many ways, representative of who my clients is, in my judgment.  And so I believe that not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s to the benefit of my client that the way I try a case should be courteous.  It should represent preparedness, it should be fair, shouldn’t take unfair advantage of a plaintiff or a plaintiff’s witness.  And that reflects on who my client is.

Kelsie Sullivan: With insurance litigation, there seems to be a focus on the company rather than the individual. And because of my experience with my dad working in insurance and my brother working in insurance, my focus is really to show the individual that’s handling your claims or answering your questions about your policy and show that’s on an individual side rather than just the corporation that most people visualize. And that’s a lot of times the difficulty with a jury. They see a corporation coming in, and it’s my job to show them the individual that made the decision or helped make the decision.

I was interested in joining McAfee & Taft because we had worked with a great group of attorneys a few years ago, and we didn’t stop. We continued having lunches and brainstorming, reaching out to each other to get advice to say or experience, you know, have you had this situation? We’ve had this situation. What did you do? What would you do? And I was really interested in turning that informal friendship into a real-life partnership. McAfee has the depth of the resources and the depth of the bench. We are able to work with multiple clients on multiple fronts. We can have a team at one courtroom while not taking away from someone working in discovery. Discovery is another thing that is a huge resource, and in Oklahoma discovery – the process of getting to trial – the information has become very, very broad and we need multiple people to be able to review those documents, to see what’s responsive, to see what’s admissible. And McAfee provides a depth of experience with other types of litigation besides just insurance, like with products liability. And they’re used to dealing with that multitude of documents and getting through them more economically than we have done before because the broader discovery is newer to insurance. It may be old hat to products  liability and other types of litigation, and so McAfee is primed for us to be able to do that in a reasonable and efficient manner for our clients.

Bill Leach: Phil Richards has tried more defense-side, extra-contractual coverage litigation than anybody in the state, and whoever is second is not close. A guy like that doesn’t come along every day. He’s a generational type of person in addition to just the pure client service aspects of it. Having somebody with that kind of experience is just invaluable for our young lawyers. There’s an extra resource for them to go, so they don’t have to be recreating the wheel on everything. Between Phil and some of the others of us here, we’ve probably seen pretty much 90%, 95% of all the problems that can arise. So having resources like that helps people make good decisions quickly without having to spend a lot of client’s time and resources.

Phil Richards: McAfee & Taft has great insurance lawyers. I’m looking forward to trying some cases with some of the folks that have already been here and getting some opportunities to do that. After about 125 or so jury trials, you just learn some things, and the opportunity to pass that on to some of the younger lawyers and to give them a chance to get into the courtroom for me is exciting, to teach them some of the stuff I learned the hard way over all those years.

Kelsie Sullivan: What I’ve learned from Phil is to always be the most prepared person in the room. You need to be the most prepared on the law. You need to be most prepared to introduce your client, and you need to know the facts of the cases. So if you’re the most prepared, yeah, you can do your job right.

Bill Leach: The addition of the new team of lawyers will put us in a position to handle what’s coming, and what’s coming is a lot. This is a very difficult regulatory, legislative and judicial environment for insurance companies –not really just in Oklahoma, but throughout the country. And it’s going to take a lot of manpower and a lot of expertise for those types of companies to do well and thrive and prosper and continue to be able to do business in Oklahoma. We have the manpower, the expertise, and the capability to deal with any challenge that’s coming, and we’re excited about it.