"Hardworking" has been a defining characteristic of new OBA President Deborah Reheard since her childhood in Vinita, where she grew up on a dairy farm just outside the Northeastern Oklahoma community. She credits her small-town upbringing, along with her parents, for instilling her with good common sense and the strong work ethic she applies in her law practice and personal life today.
"Dad milked cows everyday at 6 a.m., working a herd of 100 head and farming 2,000 acres,” the Eufaula attorney said. “My parents worked very hard so we would have it better than they did."
From childhood in a two-room schoolhouse she moved on to Vinita High School, where she was a member of the first ever Blue Pride Drill Team. "We thought we were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders," she said. It was winning an essay contest and a trip to Washington, D.C., that convinced Ms. Reheard to put pompoms aside and instead pick up a pen to pursue a career in journalism.
Her lifelong love for animals initially sent her to Oklahoma State University where she planned to focus her studies on veterinary medicine and agricultural journalism. Ultimately she completed her studies at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, working all the while for her small-town newspaper. She wrote and served as editor for a number of community newspapers after graduating, reporting on crime and courts. That was where her interest in the law began to take shape. President Reheard said, "I thought to myself 'I can do that,' and realized I would like it. When I was 27 years old, the opportunity came along to go to the TU College of Law full time, so I took it."
While in school, she interned at the city attorney’s office in Tulsa, eventually landing a full-time job there after graduating and passing the bar exam in 1987. Later she worked as an assistant district attorney in Craig, Mayes, Rogers, Ottawa and Delaware counties. "My mentor, Rockey Boydston, gave me the opportunity to take over his solo practice in Eufaula in 1991," she said. "I've been there ever since."
President Reheard says the majority of her practice is focused on family law and criminal defense, but she takes on a wide variety of cases. "In a small town you draw a bit of everything. What draws me to the law is the advocacy work, and what I enjoy most is trial work. What I love about being a lawyer in a small community is that it’s about problem solving and helping people."
She believes her nearly two decades in private practice are strong qualifications for her leadership of the Oklahoma Bar Association this year.
"The law is a tough business to be in, so we need to be able to provide our members with the services they need to be effective in their practices," she said. "I travel around the state to work on cases, I don't practice in one county, and I am out of my office a lot in court. I think I've got a good handle on what the vast majority of the attorneys want, need and think about our association."
President Reheard is a self-described "bar junkie," having served on the OBA Board of Governors since 2006. She also served a six-year term on the Judicial Nominating Commission, including serving as its chairperson, and is a frequent CLE presenter on the topic of bar disciplinary proceedings. In fact, she estimates for the last 10 years, almost all of her spare time has been spent on bar activities. "When I am doing trial work, there are clients, there is opposing counsel, people are not always on their best behavior and there are interactions that lead to problems," she said. "There are just a lot of people who are mad at each other. When I am doing bar work, I am around other attorneys who love the profession and the association. It's a way to interact with other attorneys advocating toward a common goal rather than butting heads in a courtroom."
President Reheard says taking a leadership role was important to her personally because she had specific projects she wanted to work on as bar president. Providing legal assistance for military service members and veterans is her top priority.
"I was thinking about things I need to do and my term happened to coincide with a year our state will be sending 4,000 troops to Afghanistan," she said. “So we created Oklahoma Lawyers for America's Heroes, working with the Pros 4 Vets organization to provide legal services. I had limited exposure to the military growing up, but I was seeing so many people come through my office that we could trace a lot of their problems to their military service. Service members have made sacrifices for us. We need to do a better job of helping them when they come back.
We have also started a special committee to deal with the unauthorized practice of law. Oklahomans are being taken in by unscrupulous people pretending to be attorneys, and we are going to put a stop to it. It's about protecting the public."
With a busy legal practice of her own to maintain in Eufaula, it’s natural to wonder whether there are enough hours in day to accomplish all the goals President Reheard has laid out for her term.
"I have great staff and family support," she responds. "I have planned for this. I have a longtime assistant, Kim Wegner, and another very competent attorney in my office, Steve Barnes, plus a part-time secretary, Cindy Bacon. We will adjust and it will all work out."
President Reheard has been married 22 years to Dale Gill, who is originally from Texas. Together they own a working ranch in Checotah, where they breed, train, and show reining and working cow horses. Their work recently extended from the equine to the canine, when they began breeding Fell terriers, hunting dogs originating in England and Ireland. The couple occasionally travels across the Atlantic together to import the dogs to Oklahoma. In addition, President Reheard has four pet dogs of her own. Bruiser is a Fell terrier who was abandoned by his mother. Maxie and Zeb are Jack Russell terriers the couple rescued from owners who were unprepared for the challenges of the rambunctious breed. Then there is the alpha dog, Tater, a rat terrier who came to the couple through a case of mistaken identity.
"I was doing an adoption for a family who raised rat terriers," she explained. "I told the mother that my husband always wanted one of those, even though what he really wanted was a completely different kind of dog. But then this little girl comes into my office with a box of puppies about eight weeks old, so small you could hold them in the palm of your hand. The little girl tells me she'd like me to have one, because I was the one making her ‘daddy’ her real father for the rest of her life. And that's how I got Tater, who is the meanest damn dog you’ve ever seen in your life."
President Reheard believes her competence as an attorney along with her desire to work exceptionally hard is what best qualifies her to lead the OBA. She notes that 2011 is a historic year for the association; for the first time in its 106 years a woman is serving in the three top spots on the Board of Governors: herself as president along with Cathy Christensen serving as president-elect and retired Judge Reta Strubhar serving as vice president.
"I watched Melissa (DeLacerda, 2003 OBA president) and Mona (Salyer Lambird, 1996 OBA president) and saw what they did to promote not just women but promote all attorneys, and I thought we had come a long way. I’ve never wanted to be the first ‘woman’ anything. I just go out and do what I need to do. Sometimes because I didn't know any better," President Reheard laughs. "I think we've come to the point where we are taking leadership roles not because we are women, but because we are great attorneys who just happen to be women."
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