were bright and capable to do some of the work that lawyers had done before,” said Balloun, L’54, now a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP in Kansas City, Mo. “That was a period of time when people were much more prone to try cases as opposed to settling. Litigation was not nearly as expensive as it is now, so we were quite busy.” Initially, Turner’s opponents — weary of losing to him in court — insisted that paralegals were engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. But by 1968, the American Bar Association had investigated Turner’s model and decided to endorse a national program of paralegals, Turner said in a 2001 interview. “For seven years, I was the chairman of the committee that did that,” he said. Lee and Betsy spoke and published articles on the topic across the United States and in Canada, and Lee led several ABA committees that helped develop and expand the concept of legal assistants and to inform lawyers of their potential. Paralegal courses and schools sprang up throughout the country. Many of the paralegals who worked in Turner’s firm developed an interest in engaging more deeply with the law and went on to pursue legal education. Turner estimated that as many as 30 employees left his firm to attend law school and now practice law. Mary Christopher was part of that group. Now a partner at Goodell, Stratton, Edmonds & Palmer LLP in Topeka, Christopher started in Turner’s Great Bend office in 1983. “We each had 60 to 80 files and had to keep track of all the filing, scheduling and deadlines. Our job was to make sure we were being proactive — not only meeting deadlines, but staying ahead of deadlines,” said Christopher, who graduated from the Washburn University School of Law in 2001. “Looking back, the way Lee and Betsy had this organized was amazing, really.” Christopher enjoyed the work and stayed with the firm for 15 years. By then, her children were older, and she moved her family across the state to attend law school in Topeka. Lee wrote her a letter of recommendation, which she always appreciated. “He lived to argue. He was an extremely talented and competitive lawyer,” Christopher said. “He won a lot because that was his drive; he wanted to win. It made him very successful and popular with clients, but he wasn’t always popular with other attorneys.” Among his happy clients was Cecil Miller. Turner won a $19 million judgment in 1984 for the Rice County farmer SEPT and other nearby landowners in a suit against the American Salt Company, which injected so much salt into the aquifer that the farmers could not irrigate with the polluted water. American Salt’s parent company argued that the case was no longer actionable because they had been polluting the aquifer since the early 1900s. The court rejected that claim in a landmark decision that characterized the pollution as a continuing abatable nuisance. In addition to environmental pollution, Turner’s practice revolved around medical and professional liability,
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personal injury, products liability, and commercial litigation. In more than four decades of trial work, he personally tried at least 1,700 civil jury cases. By the early 1970s, the Turners were parents to six children, and Lee’s professional commitments were increasing. He chaired the ABA’s Special Committee on Legal Assistants, served actively on the ABA Section of Economics of Law Practice and founded the American Law Firm Association. He also served on the faculty of the Institute for Continuing Legal Education in Ann Arbor, Mich., and as general counsel to the University of Kansas Medical School. Turner’s practice eventually grew to include five offices employing up to 30 attorneys and more than 150 support staff at any one time. And that seismic boom originated with Betsy Turner’s simple idea and her husband’s enterprising eagerness to put it into action. “Today, legal assistants are everywhere and are helping lawyers in ways that could not have been contemplated in 1970. Most of us could not imagine trying to practice without them,” wrote Texas attorney James E. Brill in a memorial article on Turner for the College of Law Practice Management. “What is most remarkable is that an entire career path can be traced to a single lawyer: Lee Turner.” n
Lee Turner was one of the first lawyers in Kansas to earn his pilot’s license and use his plane to better serve clients throughout the state as if they lived down the block in Great Bend. Listen to archived audio interviews with the late Lee Turner, L’52, about his trial days at www.law.ku.edu/ku-law-magazine
KU LAW MAGAZINE 33