Brenda Estrada-Brown

Brenda joined the CAT team at Oliver Law Firm in February 2022, as a Legal Assistant and quickly became an essential part of who Oliver Law Firm is. Her experience in customer service allows her to develop deep and personable relationships within our team and clients, as she is always going above and beyond. Brenda has a warm heart with an upbeat personality.

Before joining the team, she served in various client focused roles for a regional bank for almost 20 years, while there she began her career as a teller and fast tracked her way into management.

Brenda is originally from Texas, but it didn’t take her long to feel at home in NWA, as she enjoys exploring the area with her husband, Shane. Together they have four fur babies: Freeshavocadoo, Simba, Coco LaRue, and Jack-Jack. She loves spending time with friends and family and leads a very active life within the community. Brenda and Shane attend Covenant Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville.

Brenda Estrada finds joy in advocating for the needs of clients

A written description of Brenda Estrada’s responsibilities with the Oliver Law Firm might look to some like a laundry list of mostly impersonal tasks. As a legal assistant, she spends much of her time collecting and organizing records for cases, filing legal motions, or coordinating schedules for client meetings, depositions, or mediations. 

But the work isn’t impersonal to Brenda. In fact, she sees herself as “an advocate” for the firm’s clients, just like the firm’s attorneys. It’s part of her job, she says, to pay attention to the needs of the clients and either address them or make sure the attorneys are aware of those needs so they can help in the best ways possible.

Brenda didn’t leave the banking industry to work for the Oliver Law Firm until 2022, but her interest in working as some type of “victim’s advocate” sprouted from a seed that was planted back in 2011.

After advancing from a teller to a branch manager, Brenda was training for a new role in a behind-the-scenes operations center in Northwest Arkansas that dealt with debit card fraud. She was alone in the office one day when a detective from Colorado called with a question about how debt cards transactions were posted. He was working for a prosecutor in a murder investigation and they were using the bank transactions to establish a timeline.

“Having been a manager, I was comfortable enough to answer that question,” Brenda says. “I knew they don’t post necessarily in the order that you made the purchase. Instead, it’s in the order in that the merchant collects. So I answered the question. Not a big deal.”

Six months later she was subpoenaed to testify at the trial in Denver. It was a surprise, but it turned out to be a positive experience for her.

“I got to meet this lady – and I still remember that her name was Jenny Johnson – who coordinated my travel, told me what to expect, met me at the hotel, and walked with me to the courthouse,” Brenda says. “When we got to the courthouse, the mom of the young lady who had lost her life was there. So I spent the morning with her while I was waiting to be called up.”

Brenda provided her testimony and returned to Arkansas, but she never forgot the role Jenny Johnson played during her trip.

“I just remember thinking after that visit of how I would love to do something along those lines – like victim’s advocate being able to be there for people in need,” she says.

Instead, she returned to banking and put the advocacy dream on a shelf until she received an out-of-the-blue phone call in 2022 from Melinda Propps, the chief financial officer for the Oliver Law Firm. Brenda and Melinda had interacted from time to time while serving in different roles at the church they attended. But they weren’t particularly close friends and didn’t have much contact after Brenda left for a different church in 2021.

“Melinda just randomly calls me one day,” Brenda says. “She said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re doing now if you are looking for a job, but we have an opening. We have a young lady who is leaving, and this morning Sach (Oliver) asked us to be prayerfully considering somebody for the job. Your name – your full name – popped in my head.’”

The timing was providential. Brenda had grown weary of the backroom data entry with the bank and longed for work that tapped into more of her potential and put her in regular contact with people. 

Ironically, it wasn’t until after her first interview with the Oliver team that she remembered testifying at the trial in Denver, which, by the way resulted in a conviction of the murder suspect. But she brought it up in a second interview, and it’s provided inspiration ever since.

Brenda works mainly with the firm’s Trial Team 9 team, which is led by attorneys Ryan Scott and Geoff Hamby. She collects, tracks, and organizes medical records, education records, telephone records, police reports, and other document evidence that becomes part of a case. But she also interacts with clients and their families because she coordinates most of the scheduling. That’s when she typically learns what clients need and finds opportunities to help.

She might make sure they have a playpen for a child whose mother is a client, for instance, or she might do her part to soothe a client’s nerves about their role in the case. 

Recently, she recognized that one client was particularly anxious about giving a deposition. So instead of just emailing her with the scheduling details, Brenda called first and talked her through what was going to happen.

“I knew it was gonna freak her out if she just got this random email,” Brenda says. “I was able to tell her, and I meant this with all honesty in my heart, that Geoff and Ryan were very knowledgeable and very compassionate. They’ve done this hundreds of times, I told her, and they would be with her through the whole thing. 

“I could tell her that with a completely clear and honest conscience, because that is the people that I work with. And that means a lot to me. I can vouch for them. I can say, ‘These are good guys. They are humans, but they’re going to do everything they can for you.’”

That’s because just like Brenda, they are advocates for their clients.