Attorney David Couch Wields Initiatives To Change the Law

The bumper stickers on David Couch’s file cabinets provide hints as to his political leanings.

If you don’t like what Little Rock lawyer David Couch does — suing nursing homes over patient care, wielding the initiated act as a way to liberalize Arkansas law — blame Jesus.

“I grew up in the Holden Avenue Church of Christ in Newport, Arkansas,” Couch said. “Jesus loves all the children, red and yellow, black and white. That’s it. That’s my politics.”

That conservative religious upbringing has expressed itself in decidedly non-conservative ways. Since 2012, his politics have led Couch to work to tighten ethics and campaign financing law in the state, legalize medical marijuana, raise the state’s minimum wage, open all of Arkansas to alcohol sales and enact laws prohibiting discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity (see timeline below).

“Sure, I’m liberal,” Couch said in a recent interview at his office in the Prospect Building. “There’s nothing wrong with liberal. I’m for the underdog.”

And he has faith in Arkansans’ sense of fairness. “I have cases in every county and all this initiative work. I get so mad when they say we’re a red state or a blue state. We’re the most populist state,” he said.

That faith underlies Couch’s use of the initiative to persuade voters to change law. “The initiative is pure democracy,” he said.

Marsha Scott, a veteran of the Clinton White House, is a political and organizational consultant and senior adviser to Todd Shields, dean of the Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas. She came to know of Couch during the 2012 campaign to raise the state’s severance tax on natural gas, Scott working for opponents of the increase and Couch working to raise it.

Signature-gathering for the tax initially was sloppy, but the effort improved when Couch came aboard. “He had thrown down the rules,” Scott said. “He was telling them how they had to do it. I heard there was a lot of grumbling because he was very strict.”

She later told Couch she wanted to work with him, because “you’re really good and this state could use a better way of running these initiatives.” Scott since then has worked “on the sidelines” with Couch on his most recent medical marijuana and ethics initiatives.

Signature gathering is Couch’s area of expertise, Scott said, and he’s assembled a good team over the years.

This kind of initiative work is “the last place that citizens can go without hiring lobbyists to really have an impact on the government,” Scott said. “And because it’s so effective —when people are given information, most people want to be involved in the process — the Legislature is having to tighten the rules more and more because they’re very afraid of that process, I believe.”

The work of drafting proposals and taking them to voters is complex. “It requires extreme oversight, very careful analysis,” Scott said. “There are any number of ways that people can, quite accidentally, make mistakes.”

In addition, “there’s a history of a lot of fraud in this area, as you well know.”

But “David is a stickler for the law, she said. “Whatever one might say about David Couch, he is a defender of the law. He believes in it. He never hides behind it. But he thinks it’s a tool for good.”

Conservative/Liberal

Couch, graduating from the Bowen School of Law in 1985, started his legal career at the old House Holmes & Jewell law firm in Little Rock. A son of a banker, Couch described himself as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal,” and at the House firm — whose name evolved as it did — he did self-insured defense and nursing home defense work, representing Beverly Enterprises for a few years.

Couch, coming to the realization that he didn’t enjoy that kind of law, eventually began to do plaintiff’s work, representing friends of members of the firm who had died in accidents.

“All of a sudden in this old firm, they could see, ‘Well, you’ve got somebody over here who likes to do plaintiff’s work. Instead of passing this out to somebody else, why don’t we keep this in-house?’ so I became like a little black sheep over in the corner, which I loved.”

Plaintiff’s work “fit my personality,” Couch said.

Then in 2001 came the Mena case.

Lawyer Phil Dixon, Couch’s mentor at the-now Dover & Dixon firm, and partner Darren O’Quinn were set to defend a nursing home in the Polk County town in a lawsuit over a patient’s death. But Dixon had a conflict, Couch said, and O’Quinn asked him to try the case with him.

The jury returned a $78.4 million verdict against the nursing home, the largest in Arkansas history at the time. The state Supreme Court later reduced the award to $26 million, but it still was an eye-popping amount.

The case helped spark so-called tort reform in Arkansas, the Civil Justice Reform Act of 2003. The act limited punitive damages to $1 million, but in 2011, the state Supreme Court ruled that cap unconstitutional.

Couch and O’Quinn left to form their own firm, Couch O’Quinn PLLC, and began pursuing abuse and neglect cases against nursing homes rather than defending them. Couch and O’Quinn split up in 2003 or ‘04, Couch said, and he’s now his own boss in a solo practice. “I get nauseous if I have to put a tie on,” he said.

Through the years, however, Couch has earned enough money to allow him to pursue his initiative work on his own dime.

“He’s a multilevel chess player,” Scott said of Couch, who’s created an unusual niche for himself in the state.

“David is, to his core, a small-town Arkansas guy,” Scott said, “a good old boy in the best sense of the word.”

But ultimately, “David just doesn’t give a shit” what people think of him, she said. “David is always focused on doing what he believes is right.”

Taking the Initiative: A Timeline

Little Rock lawyer David Couch has achieved the most public attention in the last few years through his initiative campaigns: efforts to use direct democracy — citizens voting on policy proposals — to change the law.

There are two kinds of initiatives: an act and an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution. A voter-approved initiated act creates a statute that can be altered or repealed by the Arkansas Legislature by a two-thirds vote. An initiated amendment to the state Constitution can be changed only by another vote unless the amendment specifies otherwise.

Among those initiatives: