After nearly five decades of practicing beside his best friend, Jim McConkie is making sure the firm he and Brad Parker built in Salt Lake City keeps picking the fights other firms won’t.
In October 2020, on the second anniversary of Lauren McCluskey’s death, the University of Utah settled with her family. The president of the university stood up in public and said, “We failed Lauren and her family.”
Jim McConkie, who co-founded Parker & McConkie Personal Injury Lawyers in Salt Lake City with Bradley H. Parker in 1978, had heard a lot of things from a lot of defendants by then. He had not heard many say that. “I’ve been practicing law since the 1970s,” he says. “You almost never hear an institution say that out loud.”
The McCluskey case is the one he reaches for first when asked about a win that mattered.
Lauren McCluskey was a student and a track athlete at the U. In October 2018, she was killed on campus by Melvin Rowland, a man she had briefly dated. In the days before, she and people around her had contacted campus police more than 20 times. “She did what everybody tells young women to do,” McConkie says. “She reported it. And the system that was supposed to protect her didn’t.”
The family came to the firm, and suit was filed in June 2019. Mediation with the university in May 2020 ended with no agreement. The McCluskeys had spent a year and a half reliving the worst thing that ever happened to them, and they walked out with nothing settled. The firm kept going. Five months later, the university agreed to a $13.5 million settlement: $10.5 million to the family and $3 million to the Lauren McCluskey Foundation. The school also agreed to build an indoor track for its track and field team and to rename its violence prevention center after Lauren.
The family put the money toward the foundation and campus safety. That same year, the Utah State Bar named McConkie Lawyer of the Year. He mentions it, but he doesn’t dwell on it. “The part that stays with me is that Lauren’s name is now on a building where people work on stopping this kind of violence,” he says.
From Capitol Hill to the Other Side of the Table
McConkie’s path to plaintiff’s work started a long way from Utah. He grew up in New York City and London, an unusual childhood for a lawyer who would spend his career in the Mountain West. He thinks it gave him an early sense that the world is big and that plenty of people in it don’t get a fair shake.
Public service came first. After law school at the University of Utah, he worked for Congressman Gunn McKay and became his chief of staff. In 1977 he was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney in Utah and spent the next few years prosecuting federal criminal cases. The work taught him a great deal. It also showed him what happens when a single person runs up against a system with more lawyers, more money and more time.
“When I left the U.S. Attorney’s Office, I wanted to be on the other side of that equation,” he says.
In 1980 he left that office to run for Utah Attorney General. The run led him into private practice full time with Parker, who came from a family of lawyers and had already decided to spend his career helping people hurt by someone else’s negligence or by an abuse of power. The two had started Parker & McConkie in 1978 on a simple idea: the law should serve people, not power. In practice, McConkie says, that meant taking cases most firms wouldn’t touch.
Over the next four decades, that covered car crashes, trucking cases, defective products, dog bites, brain injuries, wrongful death and a fair number of civil rights suits. In 2004 the firm settled a religious discrimination case against the University of Utah. In 1992 it won a $52 million verdict for the sister-wives of a polygamist leader in a wrongful death case, after people warned that a jury would never take those clients seriously. The jury did. In 2000 came a $10 million verdict for a child injured at birth through medical negligence, the kind of case McConkie calls some of the hardest to try because the medicine is complicated and the stakes for the family last a lifetime. The firm has also obtained the largest wrongful death judgment in Utah’s history.
The Day Brad Parker Died
The hardest stretch came on June 6, 2023. That was the day Brad Parker died.
“We’d been law partners for 47 years,” McConkie says. “I don’t think there was a single big decision in nearly five decades that we didn’t talk through together. Brad always had my back.”
Suddenly he was running the firm alone. The answer he settled on was short. Don’t change who they are. Parker loved to fight for the underdog, and McConkie figures that as long as the firm keeps doing that, it’s still Parker’s firm too.
He has help. Steven Jensen and Brian Stewart are partners, with a group of attorneys behind them. McConkie sees his job now as making sure the next generation inherits the values he and Parker started with, along with the name on the door.
There was a practical problem to solve as well. Parker & McConkie now works in five states, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington and Arizona, with nine offices running from Ogden and Provo to Boise, Idaho Falls, Rock Springs, Spokane and Mesa. Each state has its own rules. Utah generally gives an injured person about four years to file a personal injury suit. Idaho gives two. Miss that and a good case is gone before anyone has looked at it. So the firm didn’t try to run everything out of Salt Lake. It put lawyers in those communities who know the local courts and the deadlines.
Unafraid of the Flag Out Front
McConkie’s years as a federal prosecutor shape the way he handles cases now. Most plaintiff’s lawyers have never sat on the government’s side of the table. He has, and he knows how a government office protects itself and decides whether a case is worth fighting.
That matters because so much of the firm’s most important work has been against institutions: a state university, a county jail, a state agency. In 2009 the firm recovered $13 million for the State of Idaho against Eli Lilly over the marketing of Zyprexa. “Those cases take patience and a thick skin,” McConkie says, “and they take somebody who isn’t intimidated by a big building with a flag out front.”
Some of the firm’s wins have come on appeal. In 2012 it won a case requiring Utah auto insurers to explain underinsured motorist benefits to the people buying their policies, a technical-sounding result that reaches anyone ever hit by a driver without enough coverage. In 2018 it won an appeal against a nursing facility that failed to report a fatal narcotic overdose.
McConkie has also taught constitutional law for many years as an adjunct professor at Westminster College. Teaching forces him to explain why a rule exists, he says, and that habit comes in handy in front of a jury that has to be convinced a powerful defendant should meet the same standard as anybody else.
The firm keeps a line it lives by: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. People over power. McConkie applies it to a car wreck on I-15 the same way he applies it to a lawsuit against the State.
A couple of years after McCluskey, his partner Brian Stewart represented the family of Zhifan Dong, a 19-year-old international student from China at the U who was killed in 2022. That case ended in a $5 million settlement approved by the Utah Legislature in February 2023. “Those two cases are not the kind any lawyer wants to have,” McConkie says. “But they’re why we do this.”
Eight Hundred Lawyers and a Fight Nobody Paid For
The work McConkie most wants people to know about doesn’t come with a fee. In 2017 he and Parker started the Refugee Justice League. Refugees were arriving in Utah after going through more than most people can imagine, and some were meeting discrimination in housing, at work and in the ordinary places where a person just needs to be treated fairly. Many had no idea what their rights were and no money to hire a lawyer to find out.
The two put out a call to the Utah bar, hoping for a few dozen volunteers. Today the Refugee Justice League has more than 800 attorney members in Utah who give their time pro bono. In a state this size, McConkie takes that as a sign of something good in the profession here.
Years earlier, McConkie helped start Citizens Against Radioactive Waste, a bipartisan group that opposed bringing radioactive waste into Utah for storage. Nobody was paying anyone. He calls it a fight that somebody needed to pick, and he’s never minded picking those.
At home, he and his wife, Judith, have written two books together: Looking at the Doctrine and Covenants Again for the First Time in 2010 and Whom Say Ye That I Am: Lessons from the Jesus of Nazareth in 2018.
Asked what he’s proudest of, McConkie points past the verdicts to the firm. It has represented more than 3,000 clients and collected well over a thousand five-star reviews. “And I got to build all of that next to my best friend for 47 years,” he says. “It was my great privilege to work at his side.”
What Comes Next
McConkie wants Parker & McConkie to stay the firm people call when the other side is big. Since Parker’s death, much of his attention has gone to making sure the people who follow carry that forward, and to growing in Wyoming, Washington and Arizona carefully, with lawyers who live in those places and know the local courts.
He’d like to see the Refugee Justice League keep growing, too. Eight hundred attorneys is a lot. He’d be happy with a thousand.
For himself, the plan looks a lot like the last several decades. Take the cases that need taking. Teach when he can. Write with Judith. He isn’t interested in slowing down much.
“Our firm says that when we stand up for justice, we all rise,” he says. “Brad believed that, and so do I. As long as I’m around, that’s the firm I intend to run.”
Disclaimer: The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Case results, verdicts, and settlements mentioned are specific to the facts of those cases and do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. Reading this content does not create an attorney-client relationship. Legal rights, filing deadlines, and personal injury laws vary by state and may change without notice. Readers should consult a qualified attorney regarding their specific situation. Any mention of individuals, firms, or cases does not imply endorsement. This may constitute attorney advertising in some jurisdictions. The author and publisher disclaim any liability for decisions made based on this content.
Uncover insights that stand the test of time—dive into our enduring articles and grow with every read.
