In 1976, two young Phoenix lawyers bought a newspaper advertisement and were nearly suspended from practice for it. Fifty years after the ad that changed American law, the firm one of them founded — now O’Steen MacLeod Combs Phoenix — still practices at the corner of consumer law and constitutional history.
PHOENIX — JULY 9, 2026 · BY THE AWESOME ATTORNEYS EDITORIAL BOARD
READER NOTICE. This profile is independent editorial content produced by Awesome Attorneys. No law firm can purchase placement in, or influence over, our editorial series; sponsored features on Awesome Attorneys are always labeled as such. This article is general information about a law firm — it is not legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney–client relationship. Case results depend on the unique facts and law of each matter; past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict a similar outcome in any future matter.
AT A GLANCE — O’STEEN MACLEOD COMBS PLC
| FIRM | O’Steen MacLeod Combs PLC — formerly O’Steen & Harrison, PLC |
|---|---|
| FOUNDED | 1974, Phoenix, Arizona — as a self-described “legal clinic” |
| LANDMARK | Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977) — co-founder Van O’Steen, co-appellant |
| NAME PARTNERS | Jon O’Steen · Matthew P. MacLeod (managing partner) · Lincoln Combs |
| OFFICES | Phoenix (300 W. Clarendon Ave., Ste. 400) · Prescott · Payson |
| PRACTICE FOCUS | Personal injury & wrongful death; medical malpractice; products liability; insurance bad faith; nursing home abuse |
| FEE MODEL | Contingency — no recovery, no fee; free consultations; Spanish-language service |
| CONTACT | (602) 252-8888 · omclawyers.com |
I. The Advertisement That Changed American Law
On February 22, 1976, a modest advertisement appeared in the Arizona Republic. It announced that a small Phoenix “legal clinic” was offering legal services at very reasonable fees, and it listed flat prices for routine matters — uncontested divorces, uncontested adoptions, simple personal bankruptcies, and changes of name. By the standards of modern legal marketing, it was almost comically restrained. By the standards of 1976, it was professional heresy: state bars across the country then prohibited lawyers from advertising at all.
The two lawyers behind the ad, John R. Bates and Van O’Steen, had been admitted to the Arizona bar in 1972 and had spent two years at the Maricopa County Legal Aid Society before opening their clinic in March 1974. Their model — modest flat fees for people of moderate income who earned too much for legal aid — depended on volume, and volume depended on the public knowing they existed. The advertisement was a deliberate, conceded violation of Arizona’s Disciplinary Rule 2-101(B), and the machinery of professional discipline responded in kind: a bar committee recommended that each lawyer be suspended for no less than six months, later reduced by the State Bar’s Board of Governors to one week apiece — the record reflecting the Board’s view that the violation was an earnest challenge to a rule the lawyers believed invalid. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the discipline in In re Bates, 113 Ariz. 394 (1976).
The United States Supreme Court did not. In Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977) — argued January 18, 1977, and decided June 27, 1977 — Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the Court, held that the truthful advertising of the availability and price of routine legal services is commercial speech protected by the First Amendment, and that Arizona’s blanket ban could not stand. The First Amendment holding carried five votes over vigorous partial dissents from Chief Justice Burger and Justices Powell, Stewart, and Rehnquist; the appellants were represented at argument by William C. Canby, Jr. Bates did not deregulate lawyer speech — the states retained full authority over advertising that is false or misleading, the doctrinal lineage of the rule Arizona enforces today as ER 7.1. But the old wall of silence fell, in every state, at once.
Every law firm advertisement in America — every billboard, every jingle, every late-night spot — exists downstream of a one-week suspension two Phoenix lawyers refused to accept.
II. From Legal Clinic to Arizona Institution
The firm that grew out of that clinic never strayed far from its founding premise. Van O’Steen built a general consumer practice emphasizing personal injury, defective products, and nursing home abuse and neglect — the practice areas that still anchor the firm’s work as a Phoenix wrongful death attorney and nursing home abuse lawyer in Arizona today — and — in a detail that reads like a mission statement — spent years writing a weekly legal advice column for Arizona newspapers and authoring self-help packets designed to let consumers handle routine legal needs without hiring a lawyer at all. Esquire magazine profiled him under the headline “Van O’Steen Brings the Law to the People” and named him to what it called America’s new leadership class. He is a past president of the American Legal Clinic Association, a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services, and a founding director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest.
The firm’s highest-profile engagement came when, in what it describes as the single largest damages case in history, its attorneys were selected by the Arizona Attorney General as the only Arizona law firm to represent the State against American tobacco companies. The firm reports that, as a result of that litigation, Arizona taxpayers stand to receive more than three billion dollars for the costs of treating tobacco-related illness and for smoking-prevention programs. Alongside the tobacco work, the firm reports recoveries in the millions of dollars in personal injury cases and from pharmaceutical companies, and — on its legacy website — a settled-or-won rate above 99 percent in the car accident cases it accepts. Awesome Attorneys presents these figures as the firm’s own reported results; they are attributed, not independently audited.
Van O’Steen withdrew from full-time practice in 2022 and now serves as an advisor to the firm; co-founder James Harrison likewise remains listed with the firm he helped name. For most of its history the shingle read O’Steen & Harrison. It no longer does — and the reason is the story of the firm’s third act.
III. The New Name on the Door
In 2021, two of Arizona’s established catastrophic-injury litigators joined the firm: Matthew P. MacLeod and Lincoln Combs. Their arrival, and their subsequent elevation to name partnership alongside Jon O’Steen, produced the firm’s current identity — O’Steen MacLeod Combs PLC — a renaming that preserved the founding name while announcing a generational bench built for the largest cases the firm handles.
MacLeod, the firm’s managing partner, focuses his practice on catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death matters, including medical malpractice, products liability, insurance bad faith, elder abuse, dram shop, opioid litigation, correctional health negligence, and Section 1983 civil rights claims. A University of Notre Dame graduate (2000) — where he played varsity basketball — with a J.D. from Arizona State University (2003), he has been named to Super Lawyers every year since 2013 and to The Best Lawyers in America for personal injury litigation, and he sits on the Board of Governors of the Arizona Association for Justice.
Combs brings the appellate pedigree. He finished fourth in his 2006 class at Arizona State’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, served on the Arizona State Law Journal — earning the 2005 Best Student Note Award — and clerked for Justice Andrew D. Hurwitz on the Arizona Supreme Court. His practice concentrates on catastrophic injury and wrongful death, products liability, medical malpractice, insurance bad faith, and civil rights claims; he has been named to the Super Lawyers Top 50 list for Arizona and to Best Lawyers for both personal injury litigation and products liability litigation, is a past co-chair of the American Association for Justice’s IVC Filters Litigation Group, and his cases and commentary have been featured on NPR, Fox News, and ABC15.
Jon O’Steen — the continuity between the firm’s second and third acts — joined in 2005 after graduating cum laude from Arizona State’s law school, where he was Senior Articles Editor of the Arizona State Law Journal and a Willard H. Pedrick Scholar. He is a past president of the Arizona Association for Justice, a member of the Board of Governors of the American Association for Justice, AV Preeminent rated, and a Super Lawyers Top 50 honoree for Arizona. The partners are supported by attorneys Kathryn K. McCormick, Sophia J. Augeri, and Phillip E. Lapointe.
IV. The Practice Today at O’Steen MacLeod Combs Phoenix
O’Steen MacLeod Combs Phoenix runs a deliberately consumer-side book: the firm states flatly that it never represents insurance companies or product manufacturers. As a Phoenix medical malpractice attorney and Arizona products liability lawyer among its core roles, its practice spans car, truck, and motorcycle crashes; medical malpractice in more than a dozen sub-specialties, from birth injury and anesthesia errors to correctional and urgent care; products and consumer litigation including asbestos and mesothelioma, talcum powder, and paraquat matters; insurance bad faith; legal malpractice; nursing home abuse; dangerous road design; and defective tires. Representation is on contingency — no recovery, no fee — with free consultations and Spanish-language service.
The footprint is quietly distinctive. Alongside its Phoenix headquarters on West Clarendon Avenue, the firm keeps staffed offices in Prescott and Payson — rim-country and central-highlands communities that most Valley injury firms serve only by billboard — and it advertises service to all Arizona communities, from Yuma to Flagstaff to Kingman.
V. Landmark Engagements
The firm does not publish an itemized verdict-and-settlement ledger of the kind some Valley competitors maintain; its public record instead rests on a small number of engagements of unusual historical weight, summarized below with sourcing noted.
| ENGAGEMENT | FIRM’S ROLE | OUTCOME / STATUS |
|---|---|---|
| Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977) | Co-founder Van O’Steen, co-appellant with John R. Bates | U.S. Supreme Court holds truthful price advertising of routine legal services is protected commercial speech; blanket bans on lawyer advertising invalidated nationwide. Verified against the official reporter. |
| State of Arizona v. American tobacco companies | Firm reports selection by the Arizona Attorney General as the only Arizona firm representing the State | Firm reports more than $3 billion expected to Arizona taxpayers for tobacco-related health costs and prevention programs. Firm-reported. |
| Contemporary injury practice | Car, truck, and motorcycle crashes; catastrophic injury and wrongful death | Firm reports a settled-or-won rate above 99% in accepted car accident cases and recoveries in the millions of dollars, including from pharmaceutical defendants. Firm-reported. |
RESULTS DISCLAIMER. Every case is different. The engagements and figures above depend on the unique facts, law, and circumstances of each matter; past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. Figures marked “firm-reported” are the firm’s own statements and have not been independently audited by Awesome Attorneys.
VI. What Clients Say
Awesome Attorneys does not reproduce testimonials verbatim; we read them in volume and report the pattern. Across reviews published on the firm’s website and on major attorney directories, several themes recur with unusual consistency. Clients of Jon O’Steen describe a lawyer who explains process and next steps in plain English, stays reachable, and asks after the client’s recovery — including, in one account, the wellbeing of passengers he did not even represent. Lincoln Combs’s clients describe feeling supported and heard through the worst period of their lives. Reviewers repeatedly credit the firm’s attorneys with taking — and winning — cases that a prior lawyer had declined as unwinnable, and peer reviews on Martindale-Hubbell describe referring counsel who send the firm their own complex wrongful death matters and report uniformly satisfied clients. The composite is a referral-grade reputation: the kind built lawyer to lawyer, not billboard to bus bench.
VII. Community & Public Service
The firm’s public-service identity begins with its founder’s: Van O’Steen’s decades of consumer legal-education columns, his self-help publications, his ABA delivery-of-legal-services leadership, and his founding directorship of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest form one of the more sustained access-to-justice records in the Arizona bar. The current generation carries the thread in different registers: Matthew MacLeod is past chairman of the Alzheimer’s Association’s Desert Southwest Chapter and a member of its AIM Leadership Society, and the firm’s partners hold a density of governance roles — a past presidency and two current Board of Governors seats at the Arizona Association for Justice, plus a national Board of Governors seat at the American Association for Justice — unusual for a roster of eight attorneys.
VIII. Credentials & Recognition
Seven of the firm’s lawyers are recognized in the 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America, per Best Lawyers’ own published firm profile, and the firm holds Best Law Firms recognition; five of its attorneys have been selected to the Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists per the Super Lawyers directory. The firm is rated AV Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell — the directory’s highest peer rating for legal ability and ethical standards — and is a member of the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers. Jon O’Steen and Lincoln Combs have each been named to the Super Lawyers Top 50 list for Arizona; Matthew MacLeod has been selected to Super Lawyers annually since 2013. The firm has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau since 2019. In keeping with Arizona ethics rules, Awesome Attorneys notes that no attorney profiled here claims State Bar certified-specialist status, and none is described as a specialist in this article.
IX. The Arizona Legal Backdrop
Arizona remains one of the most claimant-favorable tort environments in the country, and the rules that define it pass directly through this firm’s docket. Most personal injury and medical malpractice actions must be filed within two years of accrual under A.R.S. § 12-542, with wrongful death claims accruing at the death of the injured person. Arizona is a pure comparative fault state under A.R.S. § 12-2505: contributory negligence and assumption of risk are always questions for the jury, and a claimant’s damages are reduced in proportion to the claimant’s own fault rather than barred — though the statute allows no comparative recovery to a claimant who intentionally, willfully, or wantonly caused or contributed to the injury or wrongful death. And Article 2, Section 31 of the Arizona Constitution forbids any law limiting the amount of damages recoverable for death or personal injury — a prohibition now subject to a single, voter-approved exception shielding crime victims from damage claims brought by persons injured in the course of their own felony conduct.
There is a satisfying circularity in the last chapter of that backdrop. The rule that governs how this firm — and every firm in this series — may describe itself to the public is Arizona’s ER 7.1, which since January 1, 2021 has also absorbed the state’s certified-specialist regime following the abrogation of former ERs 7.4 and 7.5. ER 7.1’s operative command is that lawyer communications must not be false or misleading. That is not merely the rule this firm lives under; it is the rule its founder created the need for. Bates legalized lawyer advertising and, in the same breath, reserved to the states the power to police untruthful claims. Every disclaimer in this article — including the two you have already read — exists because Van O’Steen won.
X. Editorial Assessment
Awesome Attorneys’ assessment: O’Steen MacLeod Combs Phoenix is the rare injury firm whose strongest credential cannot be bought, borrowed, or bettered — provenance. No competitor in this series, and no firm in the country, can claim its origin story; Article 6 of this series profiled the firm that built Arizona’s most famous advertising brand, and this is the firm that made that brand legal. But heritage alone does not try a catastrophic injury case, and the 2021 additions of MacLeod and Combs read as a deliberate answer to exactly that point: a managing partner with a decade-plus Super Lawyers run and a former Arizona Supreme Court clerk who graduated fourth in his class now sit atop the letterhead. The firm’s governance density in the plaintiffs’ bar, its AV Preeminent rating, and its rural Prescott and Payson offices round out a profile with genuine statewide reach.
The honest caveats are structural, not qualitative. The firm is mid-transition from a name Arizona has known for fifty years to one the market is still learning — most legal directories, we found, have not caught up. And it publishes institutional claims rather than an itemized results ledger, which asks the reader for a measure of trust that firms posting verdict tables do not. In our judgment that trust is well collateralized — by the reporter citation at 433 U.S. 350, by a half-century of continuous practice, and by a bench the plaintiffs’ bar itself keeps electing to lead it. Provenance, it turns out, compounds.
Methodology
This profile was prepared by the Awesome Attorneys Editorial Board and verified on July 9, 2026 against primary sources: the firm’s current website (omclawyers.com) including the individual biography pages of Jon O’Steen, Matthew P. MacLeod, Lincoln Combs, and Van O’Steen; the firm’s legacy website (vanosteen.com); the official text of Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977), via the Supreme Court reporter as published by Justia, Cornell LII, and the Library of Congress; the Arizona Legislature’s static statutory files for A.R.S. §§ 12-542 and 12-2505 and Ariz. Const. art. 2, § 31 (azleg.gov); the Best Law Firms and Super Lawyers published firm profiles; the Martindale-Hubbell firm listing; and the Better Business Bureau business profile. Claims that could not be traced to such sources were cut. Figures identified as firm-reported are the firm’s own statements. No firm may purchase placement in this series; O’Steen MacLeod Combs did not pay for, review, or approve this article.
Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice
This profile is an independent editorial article published by Awesome Attorneys. Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any lawyer or law firm profiled on this site, and inclusion in this series is not paid placement. “Awesome Attorneys” is a brand name only; it is not a rating, ranking, or claim that any profiled firm is superior in any legal category.
Awesome Attorneys maintains a separate attorney directory. Only listings there marked “Sponsored” or “Ad” reflect a paid or sponsored relationship with Awesome Attorneys; this editorial profile is not such a listing.
Facts, figures, and claims in this profile were independently researched from public sources as described in the Methodology section and are current only as of the research date; they are subject to change without notice, and readers should confirm any detail directly with the firm before relying on it. This notice supplements, and does not replace, the Reader Notice at the top of this article.