Women to know: SMU alumna Haleigh Jones went from aspiring lawyer to arguing a winning case before the Supreme Court of Texas

Go to law school? “What, like it’s hard?”

Haleigh Jones, partner at Crawford, Wishnew & Lang, invoked that iconic Legally Blonde quote when revealing she decided at 12 years old that she wanted to go to law school someday.

“Nobody believed me,” the 36-year-old says, about 11 years after graduating from Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

Well, her mother believed in her and, in fact, planted that seed, observing that Jones was good at the lawyer necessities — reading, writing and arguing.

Unlike Elle Woods (at least in the first movie), Jones specializes in commercial law, not criminal. This part was inspired by her father, the original franchisee of Cicis Pizza, who was involved in a bad business deal that led to her family living on food stamps. She recalled that when she was a high school freshman, buying a $7 ticket for a movie that she wanted to see with her friend was unaffordable. When she asked what exactly happened to put her family in that situation, her father replied that he should have consulted a lawyer.

So Jones set out on the path to be the kind of attorney who would’ve assisted her father.

“I felt like a lawyer would have really helped my parents make some decisions, both in terms of selling their business and filing for bankruptcy and how they approached that process,” she says. “My dad is a smart guy, but lawyers kind of hold the keys to the kingdom when it comes to the legal system.”

Jones was born in Dallas but grew up in Georgia and Ohio, the latter of which led her to study political science and Spanish at the University of Cincinnati. Her parents relocated back to our city before Jones was accepted into law school at SMU. Seeing that Dallas is a good place to be a lawyer, she decided to stick around after graduation and has been here ever since, currently on the edge of Lakewood and Junius Heights with her husband and newborn baby.

“I kind of started getting connected to the market in law school and was like, ‘I don’t ever want to practice anywhere else, really,’” she says. “This is kind of the best of best balance in terms of pay to cost of living to sophistication of the legal work that’s being done in Dallas.”

A connection in law school led her to her current firm. While at the Dallas location of Foley & Lardner, the firm that once employed Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, she received a call from a legal recruiter, whom she met at a banquet in her SMU days. He said three lawyers were starting their own firm and looking for an associate, but Jones wasn’t sure she wanted a new job. Eventually, she agreed to meet with the founders, but when she asked about their five-year plan, one of them, Trey Crawford, said, “To be the most badass law firm in Dallas.”

That didn’t impress Jones much. The recruiter, acknowledging the weird interview, convinced her to give them another chance and meet them for drinks. She ended up talking with Crawford for hours, and by the end, she was signing her offer on a napkin. What won her over was Crawford’s personality and the chance to establish her identity as an attorney.

“If you’re in a big firm, the people know the firm name, but they rarely remember the lawyer,” she says. “It’s hard to distinguish yourself from the machine of the big firm. And he said, ‘Do you want to be Haleigh Jones, or do you want to be just another lawyer at Foley?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I want to be Haleigh Jones,’ and he was like, ‘Well, then come to my firm and be Haleigh Jones.’”

That was about eight years ago, and she feels like her risk paid off. Last year marked a milestone in Jones’ career when she argued before the Supreme Court of Texas — and won. The Supreme Court of Texas doesn’t take up every case filed, she says, so the fact that Jones was able to argue before the court and succeed is a big deal. And she did so pro bono and while 20 weeks pregnant.

“When the court walks in, it’s kind of a goosebumps moment of, ‘This is the highest authority in the state of Texas,’” Jones says. “Most of the law that affects Texans is created by the Texas Supreme Court, and so just seeing them come in, it’s a surreal moment as a lawyer when you’re looking at the highest authority in the jurisdiction in which you practice, and you’re going to try to convince them that you’re right.”

In grade school, we were taught that the legislative branch makes laws, the executive branch enforces laws, and the judicial branch interprets laws. That last one is what Jones’ case set out to do.

“What it means is that plaintiffs who are injured can rely on affidavits to establish that the medical treatment that they had to receive from their injury was reasonable in cost and medically necessary, instead of bringing live experts to trial,” she says.

Jones’ client was pulling out of a parking space at a Target when another driver backed into her vehicle. The plaintiff filed an affidavit that detailed her medical expenses, and the defendant only disputed 25% of them, meaning the majority were agreed upon. But the trial court wanted Jones’ client to bring in live medical experts to prove all the expenses.

And keep in mind — the specialists who work on these cases don’t come cheap.

“We pay doctors, sometimes, $2,000 an hour to work on a case,” Jones says.

When cases reach the state’s Supreme Court, precedents are set that affect all of us, not just those within the courtroom. Now, Texans pursuing personal injury cases can rely on an affidavit in court to prove medical expenses are reasonable and necessary instead of being compelled to bring in live experts. They also have the choice to hire those live experts if they are vying to receive 100% of their costs or compromise on a settlement without the live testimonies.

“The defendant has a right to make his challenge, but where he’s not challenging certain claims or certain line items or some of the treatment, the affidavit should still be able to come in and be sufficient evidence of stuff that he’s not challenging,” Jones says. “That’s more aligned with the spirit of the rule, which is you don’t have to bring a live expert if it’s unchallenged.”

Another case stands out in her mind. Jones represented a young person in suing a Texas school district near Waco for failing to sufficiently help after she wrote about being sexually assaulted in a school assignment.

“It got sent to the assistant principal and the principal, who did not contact her parents, who did not contact a counselor, who did nothing with this information at a time she’s being sexually abused by this teacher in their system,” Jones says.

Jones and her team brought forth a municipality claim and a Title IX claim in federal court, lost the former, and the latter was settled out of court. That was her most difficult case, she says, and though it wasn’t a total loss, the unwon cases tend to stick out in general. And that’s just part of her career field. A lawyer can take on a hard case, give it their best and still lose.

“We have a saying here that we hate losing more than we like winning,” Jones says. “I always tell other lawyers who are trying cases and handling high-stakes appeals, ‘If you’re not losing, it’s because you’re not trying.’”

Despite her success, Jones still has imposter syndrome like the rest of us, including when she received the Texas Women’s Foundation Young Leader Award. She remembers questioning what made her special enough to achieve the honor. But she also has some advice for combating negativity.

“My No. 1 rule in life about being mean to myself is I try to talk to myself the way that I would talk to a friend,” she says. “I would never say to a friend who’s done the kind of work that I have, ‘You don’t belong on that stage.’ I would never say that to her, and she probably does belong up there.”