Widely respected and well-liked by her peers, Brenda Keen has been one of Houston’s leading matrimonial attorneys for nearly two decades. In many respects, she is a classic Houston success story: Through hard work and persistence, and with no special connections, the 58-year-old Keen has displayed a unique resourcefulness -- she worked with some of the leading attorneys in the field before launching her own practice more than 15 years ago. She served as president of two state family law professional associations, and was the first chair of the Collaborative Law Section of the Houston Bar Association. All along, she overcame the usual professional barriers women have long faced. But Keen, grounded and modest, is hardly impressed by any of that. “There are many woman professionals out there who took greater risks than I ever faced,” she says. Peers say Keen maintains a practical and cheerful approach, as her practice has evolved with the law, focusing increasingly on collaborative law and mediation -- alternatives to high-stakes, high-cost litigation.

Keen was born in Arkansas, and grew up “everywhere the oil business took my dad.” Her father worked for a geophysical company, and in the early years, the family moved several times a year from small town to small town in Texas and Oklahoma. After attending high school in New Orleans, she lived briefly with her family in London, and enrolled in college for a year in Germany. She continued her undergraduate education at the University of Houston. She declared initially as an education major, but when she realized sometime in her junior year that she had not taken any education courses, but had enough hours in either English or history for her degree, she decided to apply to law school.

In the years that followed, Keen worked closely with Fullenweider on family law cases -- becoming a skilled litigator in the process. “If I’ve had a primary mentor, it would be Donn.” A few years later, though, Keen decided to launch her own practice -- a bold move for any attorney in a secure position with a leading firm. And the stakes remained high: Her husband passed away of cystic fibrosis in 1990, at age 43, and her son, Duncan, was barely 5 years old. She married again, briefly (“I changed my name for a while there, and all I did was confuse a lot of young lawyers”), but her reputation as a divorce lawyer continued to shine, and her practice thrived.

Over the last decade Keen’s practice has increasingly focused on alternatives to the traditional adversarial divorce process -- primarily the use of the collaborative process, in which both parties in divorce agree to resolve their dissolution without going to court. While alternatives to litigation are fast becoming central to Keen’s practice, she continues to litigate the most highly contested cases. “I don’t think I will ever lose the courtroom bug, and sometimes litigation is the only alternative a client has.”

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