Jenkins Fenstermaker marks 100 years of excellence practicing law in West Virginia.
By Jean Hardiman
Photos by Rick Lee
HQ 121 | Spring 2023
One hundred years of practicing law. That’s a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings. A lot of research. A lot of briefs, contracts and trials. Countless documents and arguments. Many wins. Many lessons learned. Many lives changed for the better. That’s a breadth of proven, reliable knowledge put to good use for the community.
For the attorneys of Jenkins Fenstermaker PLLC, which is celebrating 100 years of service in Huntington, a century of service has also led to a trove of priceless relationships.
“We have been blessed to have many of the same clients for decades and owe our success to their loyalty. At the same time, we have been successful in cultivating new clients,” said Lee Murray Hall, a longtime partner at the firm. “We take pride in our legacy as a West Virginia firm, based in West Virginia to serve primarily West Virginia clients.”
The firm — which is celebrating its centennial with acts of service and celebrations throughout the year — has 28 attorneys, including 12 partners, who specialize in business and commercial law, labor and employment law, litigation and estate planning. The firm’s legacy is as strong in 2023 as it has ever been, said Wes Agee, a retired partner who spent 41 years at the firm.
“Jenkins Fenstermaker attorneys compassionately but aggressively represent the interests of the firm’s clients while treating the opposing counsel with dignity and respect,” Agee said. “The firm’s attorneys also believe in being active in community affairs and charitable work. These Jenkins Fenstermaker principles over the past century often have resulted in long-lasting friendships with the firm’s clients, community leaders, charitable organizations and their colleagues’ families, friends and contacts.”
Staying local and independent has been a challenge in the legal climate of the 21st century, but it’s a legacy that goes back to a single lawyer who demonstrated commitment to his neighbors and established a tradition of excellence that continues with each passing generation.
Founder John Jenkins Sr. had gone to a high school for orphans. During World War I, he was in France, serving as an administrative assistant to Col. George S. Wallace in the Judge Advocate General’s office of the U.S. Army. Wallace was an attorney from Huntington.
After the war, Jenkins went to Georgetown University Law School while also working as administrative assistant to J. Edgar Hoover who, at the time, was the second-ranking officer of the FBI. Jenkins earned his law degree and moved with his wife to Huntington, where Wallace invited him to practice.
He practiced with Wallace for six months before opening his own firm, a firm that would one day grow into what Jenkins Fenstermaker is today. He started out working primarily on real estate cases. In the 1940s, he grew into more litigation, representing insurance casualty companies. His son, Jack, joined the firm in 1950. They had two rooms on the 11th floor of the West Virginia Building. John Jenkins passed away in 1960, and the firm’s growth started to take place in the decades to follow with the addition of Mike Farrell, Henry Kayes and Tom Krieger, but always with a focus on serving local clients in the Tri-State area.
Hall, an insurance coverage and defense attorney, joined the firm in 1993 and became a partner in 1997. She remembers working with Jack Jenkins, who in the 1990s retired as an equity partner but for the following 15 years worked every day until about a month before his death in 2008. Hall said she remembers him as being extremely professional, a consummate gentleman and a remarkably clear thinker.
“He had the ability to identify the critical issues in a case very quickly,” Hall said. “He instilled in us the importance of mastering the facts and the law and identifying the issues that would ultimately decide the outcome of the case. And he was a lifelong learner and instilled that in all of us.”
While Jenkins could have shied away from new technology toward the end of his life and career, he did the opposite, Hall said. He embraced it.
Where Jack Jenkins brought professionalism and dedication to clients, Norman Fenstermaker served as the driving force of litigation, a hard-charging trial lawyer with an excellent reputation, she said.
“Our firm has a culture of being a positive place to work. Norman and his wife fostered that culture, and passed it on to the next generation of partners. That culture is a hallmark of this firm to this day,” Hall said, adding that the list of exceptional attorneys with whom she’s worked is long, and the successes they’ve achieved both with the firm and in the positions they’ve held since are impressive.
“The mission of the firm has always been clear,” said partner Steve Golder. “From my early days as an associate for Henry Kayes and Wes Agee, I realized one thing — this firm’s fundamental guiding principle is service. Service to clients. Service to our community. Service to our employees. Service to each other.”
Anna Price, one of the firm’s younger partners, said she was drawn to the idea of working for a firm with a lot of transactional attorneys. But at Jenkins Fenstermaker, she found much more. She felt that her ideas and contributions were genuinely valued.
“I remember Lee Hall saying that she likes coming to work every day because she likes the people she works with,” Price said. “She’s right. It’s not a firm where people are yelling at each other. Everyone is working together for the betterment of the firm. Everything revolves around serving our clients while having an open environment for new employees.”
Nate Kuratomi, who defends cases involving catastrophic injuries or fatalities in the workplace, expressed how fortunate the firm is to have talented and respected attorneys at the top of their fields at all levels.
“The senior attorneys in our firm have worked together as a group for 20 years or more, and in so doing have created a culture in which lawyers are given room to grow as people and professionals,” Kuratomi said. “A number of us, including Jason Bowles and Anna Price, continue in that tradition by providing high-quality representation in the manner that we learned from Tom Scarr, Barry Taylor, Lee Hall, Bo Sweeney, Charlie Gould, Steve Wellman, Steve Golder and others. These lawyers have given us room to develop our own styles; and in turn, we have taken on the mantle of teaching, mentoring and training our talented young lawyers. We are confident that the standards that our senior lawyers have set for us are exceeded every day and will continue as a hallmark of our firm’s dedication to client service for decades to come.”
