Malcolm Smith was born in Louisiana and moved to Oklahoma at the age of twelve. He graduated high school from Marion Military Institute in Marion, Alabama. He received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Oklahoma State University. He started law school at Oklahoma City University and went to night school, working during the day, first as a minute clerk for Oklahoma County District Court Judge Jack R. Parr and, later, as a legal intern for a law firm where the focus was insurance defense. While at OCU, Malcolm was elected class representative to the school’s Student Bar Association.
Malcolm transferred to the University of Tulsa College of Law and received his Juris Doctor from there in 1981. He worked in the Civil Division of the Legal Department of the City of Tulsa as a legal intern while in law school. After graduating, he served as an Assistant City Prosecutor for the City of Tulsa. Afterwards, he had a private general law practice in Ardmore, Oklahoma for five years. While in Ardmore, among other things, Malcolm served as President of the Carter County Bar Association and as part time Municipal Judge for the nearby City of Healdton, Oklahoma.
Malcolm returned to Tulsa in 1989 to become a staff attorney for the Oklahoma State Insurance Fund, a quasi-state agency which provided workers’ compensation insurance for state agencies and private employers. He left to become an associate in the workers’ compensation department of a Tulsa insurance defense firm and, after several years there, opened his own law office concentrating on the defense of workers’ compensation cases. To enhance his knowledge of medical matters, Malcolm took classes in medical terminology and human anatomy and physiology at Tulsa Community College.
A veteran of hundreds of non-jury trials and 85 jury trials, Malcolm is also accomplished in appellate practice having won cases resulting in published opinions in all three of Oklahoma’s appellate courts, the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court of Civil Appeals.
Malcolm has long participated in professional related activities. In Ardmore he served as the county bar association’s Law Day chairman and the program he organized won the Hicks Epton Award for best program in the state. He also served as Carter County Bar Association delegate to the state bar’s annual meeting. He has served as secretary-treasurer of the Tulsa County Bar Association Workers’ Compensation Section Committee. He has served on several county bar association committees, including the Fee Arbitration Committee and Bar Foundation’s Golf Tournament Committee. In 2016 Malcolm attended the annual convention of the International Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards and Commissions in Portland, Maine to keep abreast of current events in the area of workers’ compensation from around the country.
Away from the profession, Malcolm has served his community in a number of capacities including as his church’s moderator of the board of deacons, Sunday school teacher and men’s softball team coach. He is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Tulsa and has served in various capacities as a volunteer for the Miss Oklahoma Pageant, including as a local pageant judge. Malcolm joined Alliance Francaise de Tulsa while he was taking classes at Tulsa Community College. He attained enough credits to receive a certificate in French. He has traveled to France six times. He has also had classes in German, Italian and Spanish. During Malcolm’s seven year tenure on the board of directors for Tulsa Global Alliance he hosted international visitors, served as chairman of the Toast the Host Committee and twice attended the annual meeting of the International Visitors Program in Washington, D.C.
