Missouri’s Top 20 Law Firms 2024: Stinson

Firm with Biggest Effect on Missouri Politics

Stinson’s small but mighty Jefferson City office has an outsize effect on politically salient legal matters. 

Led by Chuck Hatfield, a former chief of staff and counsel for the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, the eight-attorney office has handled cases ranging from election law to gerrymandering.

In 2021, Stinson, working with attorneys at Husch Blackwell and Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, won a unanimous Missouri Supreme Court ruling that secured the expansion of Missouri’s Medicaid system, despite the lack of a specific appropriation from the legislature.

In 2018, they defended the so-called “Clean Missouri” constitutional amendment, which sought to rein in campaign contributions and limit lawmakers from becoming lobbyists, from an effort to keep it off the ballot. After it passed, the same team in 2020 unsuccessfully challenged a proposal that repealed the amendment’s provisions intended to prevent gerrymandering.

Other wins include a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that successfully challenged the constitutionality of Missouri’s campaign finance and ethics legislation. And in 2012, they won an appellate ruling that upheld the official summary for a proposed change to the Nonpartisan Court Plan, which critics had argued was unfair and may have caused its resounding defeat.

Not all of their wins are in the realm of policy. Earlier this year, Hatfield teamed up with other lawyers to win a $23 million judgment against the state of Missouri on behalf of a defunct software company that the state failed to pay for its overhaul of a Department of Social Services’ computer system.