Partner

Lewis Coppedge was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and graduated from the high school district that spawned key school desegregation case Swan v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education.  In high school, Lewis competed in multiple sports, served in leadership roles in academic and church groups, and co-captained a state champion tennis team.  Lewis matriculated to the University of North Carolina where he played on the tennis team, transferred briefly to Texas A&M University, then returned to UNC to finish a B.S. in Business Administration.

After college, Lewis married Libby Tipton and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he sold medical laboratory testing services in four states.  Mr. Coppedge won Roche Biomedical Laboratory's prestigious President's Achievement Award in 1983 and conceptualized the project "Sneeze," the first turn-key, courier based allergy testing and treatment program offered by a national clinical reference laboratory.  After college, Mr. Coppedge also completed his M.B.A. from the University of Tulsa. 

After M.B.A. school, Lewis enrolled in the University of Tulsa College of Law where he served as Judicial Intern for the Honorable H. Dale Cook, Senior District Judge, United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma. Mr. Coppedge also worked as a legal research teaching assistant, a Westlaw student instructor, and the Managing Editor of the Tulsa Law Journal.

After law school, Lewis joined Whittenburg, Whittenburg & Schachter in Amarillo, handling a broad variety of civil matters litigation and transactional matters including director and officer liability, wrongful death and other personal injury, deceptive trade practices, real property, fiduciary liability, contract breach, products liability, labor and employment, security service, environmental, and nonsubscriber workplace injury issues.  Lewis became Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in 1996.

Mr. Coppedge also served as an adjunct Professor of Business Law at West Texas A & M University, teaching undergraduate and masters level business law from 1990 to 1997.  Developing additional transactional and office practice experience along the way, Lewis has handled numerous business transactions including multimillion dollar mergers and acquisitions including the purchase of very significant dairy plant assets and a type B merger of a wholesale grocery cooperative and a wholesale bakery cooperative.

Lewis became a partner in Conant, Whitenburg, French & Schachter, and served as outside regional or general counsel for several security (guard service, alarm monitoring, and equipment sales), real estate, financial, environmental, and food industry companies including Affiliated Foods, an Amarillo-based wholesale grocery distributor with over 1,100 employees and consolidated annual sales exceeding $800,000,000 with dairy, bakery, and finance subsidiaries.

In 1999, Affiliated Foods hired Mr. Coppedge as its first in-house general counsel, where he was directly responsible for all parent and subsidiary legal activities. Lewis handled most of Affiliated's litigation in-house (including Lambert v. Affiliated Foods, Inc., 44 S.W.3d 544 (Tex. 2001) (ranked among the five most important cases of 2001)), and also took care of all contracts (negotiation, administration, and implementation of several hundred million dollars in various supply, output, service, transportation, fuel, utilities, equipment and realty leases, health care and insurance contracts), employment issues (Title VII, FMLA, ADA, ADEA, OSHA, and nonsubscriber occupational injuries), corporate governance (parent and subsidiaries), and business transactions (realty acquisitions, mergers and acquisitions, and acquisition of distressed assets in bankruptcy proceedings).  Lewis negotiated and handled  Affiliated's  purchase of significant retail grocery store assets out of the Homeland Stores bankruptcy.  Lewis also led the acquisition team that prepared and submitted bids totaling over $52,000,000 for assets from the Furr Supermarkets bankruptcy.  Most of those assets were ultimately acquired resulting in a highly profitable annual sales increase for Mr. Coppedge's client of some $84,000,000.

Late in 2002, Lewis returned to private practice and joined Burdett, Morgan, Willamson & Boykin focusing on civil trial work, business law, and employment matters.