preacher, especially since I couldn’t talk, I was
so shy.” A year later, he joined the high school
debate team to learn public speaking and
fulfill his ministerial destiny. It was there that,
armed with the state debate championship,
he grew enamored with the idea of cross-
examining witnesses in court and, he says,
“before the eighth grade ended, I was out of
the preaching business.”
The first in his family to attend college,
thanks to multiple student loans, Whitten
excelled in moot court at the University
of Oklahoma College of Law, and in 1978,
two years before earning his J.D., he began
clerking at Foliart, Mills & Niemeyer, where he
assisted senior partner Earl Mills. The first time
Whitten accompanied his mentor to court on a
corporate fraud case, he was terrified. “When
I got out of court every day, I’d go home and it
felt like I’d been beat up,” Whitten says. “Just
sitting there with all your muscles tense all
day long in a courtroom is actually a lot harder
than I thought it would be.”
After graduation, the firm hired Whitten
full time and his nerves calmed as the
lawsuits grew in size. “In the early days, we
were trying sometimes a case a month,” he
says. “We were really rockin’ and rollin’ and
I was putting in 80, 100 hours a week. … I
never once looked at my watch and said,
‘Man, I can’t wait till the day is over and I can
go home.’ I enjoyed every minute of it.”
For two decades, Whitten focused on civil
defense work for major insurance companies
and other corporations. In the early 1980s, he
successfully defended the maker of a uranium
hexafluoride cylinder that exploded near
Gore, Okla., releasing a thick yellow cloud
of toxic uranium hexafluoride that floated
above busy Interstate 40. “We ultimately
won on summary judgment and got the
manufacturer completely out of the case
without paying a dime,” he says of the mass
tort, explaining that the user of the cylinder
knew the pressure limits of the cylinder, yet
exceeded those limits. “That was really pretty
exciting for a young kid from Seminole.”
Years later, a fellow attorney asked him
to serve as co-counsel in a case against the
insurer of a pizza company that had denied
payment on a claim involving a 16-year-old
female employee who had been raped on the
job. Whitten initially balked at the invitation.
At the time, “I was going around lecturing
insurance companies and helping my
clients stay out of bad faith,” he says. “But
what this insurance company did just looked
so wrong to me.” He tried the case and the
jury awarded the plaintiff $1.5 million.
