Published on
by Anna Sago
Growing up, Gretchen Myers, ’84, always viewed her father, a trial attorney and Mizzou Law graduate, as her hero. Now, after a long and decorated legal career, Myers will return to her and her father’s alma mater to deliver this year’s Mizzou Law commencement speech.
Myers always admired her dad’s career as an attorney, calling him the “real life Atticus Finch.” But it was through debate and other public speaking in grade school and high school that her path was solidified.
“I loved doing it. There was something about it that I found fun and exhilarating, when others dreaded it,” she explained.
That early interest in public speaking eventually led Myers to an undergraduate double major in political science and economics and later to law school, both at Mizzou. However, in law school, with few women in her class, she found the environment far different. She realized for the first time, rather than a given, she would need to prove her intelligence.
“Some of the male students would mumble about us taking a ‘man’s spot’ and didn’t believe we were serious about our careers. My Property professor, on the first day of class, began with, ‘Back in the good old days when property was property and women were property.’”
But Myers was not one to back down. For example, when Myers lost the lottery to get into Mizzou’s famous Trial Advocacy course, she went straight to the professor in charge to plead her case.
“I told him that many of us who were shut out wanted to be trial lawyers and needed the class. If they couldn’t find a way to open another section so my friends and I could take this class, then I would find a school that would and lead the charge for all of us to transfer out,” she said. “He knew that not only did I mean it, but that I would do it. He paused a bit, and said, ‘don’t do anything drastic, Gretchen, let me work on it.’”
Myers and her fellow students were able to take the class, setting her on the path to become one of the most recognized trial attorneys in the nation.
In her second year of law school, her hero, her father, passed away during finals. Although being one of few women in law school was challenging, by then, she found a community and they rallied around her.
“I was sitting in the hospital by my dad’s bedside and remember panicking thinking, ‘It is time for finals,’ and I get a call from the law school, and somehow they knew what was happening,” she said. “And the caller said, ‘Gretchen, don’t worry. We will be here when it’s all done, and we’ll figure out your finals.’”
Her fellow law review students dedicated the next edition of the Missouri Law Review to her father.
After graduating law school, Myers garnered a coveted judicial clerkship with a federal district judge before practicing at the Hullverson Law Firm for 10 years. She entered a partnership for five years and finally opened her own practice in 1999. She went on to win the Lon O. Hocker Award as one of three outstanding young trial attorneys in the state and the Award of Honor from the Trial Lawyers Association, given to the outstanding trial attorney whose lifetime of service to the profession and community serves as an inspiration to others.
Myers is consistently recognized by Missouri Lawyers Media as one of 30 personal injury attorneys in the state of Missouri “whose mere presence on a case signifies the stakes, whose career winnings total in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, whose leadership in the community is pervasive and whose recognition within the bar is undeniable.”
Moreover, throughout her career she has broken the glass ceiling with many “firsts” for women, including being the first woman elected to lead the plaintiff’s statewide bar organization, MATA. She was recently inducted as a fellow in the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, recognized as the most prestigious organization of trial lawyers in the world, limiting its membership to 500 Fellows.
In her speech to aspiring Mizzou lawyers this May, Myers hopes to encourage graduates to be bold and brave in their advocacy, to be proud of their chosen profession and to remember their soon to be taken oath to preserve and defend the Constitution and the rule of law.