Firm History

Thomas B. Pryor, the founder of our firm, was born on July 25, 1869 - four years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - in Jackson, Louisiana, where he grew up, and, upon graduating from high school attended Centenary College, which was then located in Jackson. In 1891 he secured a job in Greenwood, Arkansas, while there he began reading Blackstone. In 1893 he passed the bar examination, and over the next decade he established an active and successful practice in Sebastian County. In 1908 Thomas B. Pryor moved from Greenwood to Fort Smith to become Assistant General Attorney for the Missouri Pacific Railroad for the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma, practicing with Lovick P. Miles and Vincent M. Miles under the firm name Miles, Pryor & Miles. When Lovick Miles moved to Memphis and resigned as General Attorney for the MoPac in 1912, Thomas B. Pryor became General Attorney for the MoPac, a position he held for 35 years until his retirement in 1947. He died on May 20, 1952.

The Missouri Pacific Railroad was the flagship client of the firm during this era. As General Attorney, Thomas B. Pryor participated actively in litigation and other legal affairs for the railroad, and supervised a host of “District Attorneys” representing the railroad in litigation throughout the state of Arkansas. He is listed as chief counsel for the MoPac in hundreds of appeals to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and he appeared a number of times on behalf of the railroad in the U.S. Supreme Court. With its reputation as a “trial defense” firm, numerous liability insurance companies, and other corporations with occasion to be involved frequently in litigation, were regular clients. The two largest automobile liability insurance companies in the U.S., State Farm and Allstate, became clients of the firm in the 1920’s and have remained thus for a period of more than eighty years.

Thomas B. Pryor Jr., who was known throughout his life by his middle name Brady, joined the firm in the mid-1920’s. Brady Pryor immediately began trying lawsuits defending the MoPac and other litigation-oriented clients throughout western Arkansas, and he soon earned a reputation as one of the outstanding trial lawyers in the state. When Vincent Miles left the firm in 1933, Brady Pryor became Assistant General Attorney for the Missouri Pacific. In the 1940’s Brady Pryor was elected Arkansas State Senator from Sebastian County.

G. Byron Dobbs joined the firm in the early 1930’s and the firm name was changed to Pryor, Pryor & Dobbs. Byron Dobbs, a mild mannered, studious man, quickly established himself as an excellent legal scholar, particularly in the area of title and oil and gas law, an area of practice which expanded substantially in the 1950’s and subsequent decades. When Thomas B. Pryor died in April 1952 and Brady Pryor died unexpectedly in January 1953, the firm was reduced to Byron Dobbs alone until his son Dan B. Dobbs and Thomas B. Pryor III graduated from law school in January 1956 and began practicing with Byron Dobbs under the name of Dobbs, Pryor and Dobbs.

After practicing with the firm for three years, Dan B. Dobbs decided to continue his legal education and enrolled at the University of Illinois Law School, where he earned an LLM and an LLD, taught at the University of North Carolina and later the University of Arizona Law Schools, and distinguished himself as one of the leading legal scholars in the United States by revising the classic legal hornbook Prosser on Torts (now replaced by Dobbs on Torts) and by authoring a casebook on torts and both a casebook and a hornbook on remedies, all published by West Publishing Company and used extensively in law schools throughout the country.

During the period from the 1920’s until 1969 the firm occupied a relatively large suite of offices in the east wing of the fourth floor of the Merchants National Bank Building (now the Stephens Building), which, primarily because the Sebastian County Bar Library was housed in the building, was a haven for prominent Fort Smith legal firms, including the Hardin firm, Daily & Woods, Warner & Warner, Shaw, Jones & Shaw, and a number of individual practitioners. The firm moved out of the Merchants Bank Building in 1969 when its offices, including its entire library and all files, were deluged with water as the result of the efforts to extinguish a fire. Rather than returning to the offices occupied by the firm for almost 50 years, the firm elected to build in its present location at 315 North Seventh Street, an area which had recently been designated a historic district. The Bonneville House was located across the street from the new office building.

In 1972 Ben Barry became associated with Byron Dobbs and Thomas B. Pryor III in the firm, which shortly thereafter was renamed Dobbs, Pryor & Barry. Byron Dobbs died in 1976, and in 1979 H. Clay Robinson, Robert Yoes and Gregory G. Smith, who were previously associated in the practice of law with the late Owen C. Pearce, merged with the Pryor firm, whose name at that time was changed to Pryor, Robinson & Barry.

In October, 2000, Thomas Robertson, John Beasley and Ken Cowan of the firm of Robertson, Beasley, Cowan & Ketcham merged with the firm. Ben Barry was appointed as a federal bankruptcy judge for the Western District of Arkansas. Today the firm's name reflects the most senior partners and is Pryor, Robertson, Beasley & Smith.