A Career Built in Serious Litigation

Valeri’s experience extends well beyond operating her own law firm.

Earlier in her career, she was recruited by established statewide plaintiffs’ personal-injury firms to lead and manage offices in Wichita Falls, Lubbock, and the Midland–Odessa region. In those positions, Valeri built and supervised litigation teams, managed significant caseloads, developed case strategy, and personally handled serious and high-exposure cases.

Her early practice included complex product-liability litigation involving portable gasoline containers and catastrophic fires and explosions. She represented people suffering devastating burn injuries and families whose lives had been permanently altered by defective products.

That experience exposed Valeri early in her career to the resources, experts, engineering issues, corporate discovery, and litigation strategy involved in pursuing claims against sophisticated corporate defendants and their insurers.

Over the decades that followed, her practice expanded to include catastrophic trucking collisions, wrongful death, oilfield and industrial accidents, dangerous premises, daycare and institutional negligence, defective products, and other serious injury cases.

That breadth of experience matters. Valeri has evaluated and litigated cases from virtually every perspective—from the initial investigation and preservation of evidence through expert development, depositions, mediation, trial preparation, and trial.

A Trial Lawyer Who Teaches Trial Advocacy

Trial advocacy has been a central part of Valeri’s career from the beginning.

At Texas Tech University School of Law, she earned early admission to the school’s Board of Barristers advocacy program, ranked first in her advocacy class, and competed nationally in trial advocacy.

More than two decades later, she returned to Texas Tech Law—this time to teach.

Valeri now serves as an Adjunct Professor of Trial Advocacy at Texas Tech University School of Law, working with law students on the preparation, strategy, and courtroom skills required to effectively present a case to a jury.

She has also continued to invest heavily in advanced trial training throughout her career, including:

• Graduate, Trial Advocacy College of Texas (TACT), Texas Trial Lawyers Association
• Trial Lawyers College, Trial Skills Program — Voir Dire & Opening Statement
• Trial Lawyers for Justice — Montana Trial Program

For Valeri, trial training is not about collecting credentials. It is about continually improving the ability to communicate a client’s story to judges, opposing counsel, insurance companies, and ultimately, jurors.

Recognized by Her Peers

Valeri has received repeated professional recognition for her work as a plaintiffs’ lawyer.

She was selected as a Texas Super Lawyers Rising Star from 2007 through 2009 and has subsequently been selected to Texas Super Lawyers 2024, 2025, 2026.

She is also a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, an honor reserved for a small percentage of Texas attorneys, and has been recognized for significant personal-injury settlements in Texas.

Valeri is a member of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, organizations whose membership is limited to attorneys who have achieved million- and multimillion-dollar results for their clients.

But the professional recognition Valeri values most is the trust placed in her by clients, other lawyers, and families who ask her to handle cases that may determine what the rest of someone’s life looks like.

Experience Beyond the Courtroom

Before concentrating her career on representing injured people, Valeri gained unusual experience in Texas government and public policy.

She served as General Counsel to Texas State Representative Rick Hardcastle, giving her firsthand experience with the legislative process, governmental decision-making, and the intersection between law and public policy.

She was later appointed to the Texas Board of Manufactured Housing, ultimately serving as Chair of the Board.

Those experiences gave Valeri an understanding of organizations, regulation, corporate accountability, and institutional decision-making that continues to inform the way she approaches litigation today.

Why She Represents Plaintiffs

Valeri’s commitment to injured people is deeply personal.

She grew up in a blue-collar family that moved frequently and understood financial uncertainty firsthand. When Valeri was nine years old, her father was murdered. Her mother—pregnant at the time—was suddenly left to raise her children while working multiple jobs.

Valeri began working at fifteen and often worked two or three jobs while pursuing her education. It ultimately took eleven years of working and attending school for her to earn her undergraduate and law degrees. She became the first person in her family to graduate from college.

Those experiences shaped the lawyer she became.

Valeri understands that a catastrophic injury does not occur neatly within the boundaries of a legal claim. It can affect someone’s ability to work, care for a family, maintain independence, participate in relationships, and live the life they had planned.

That is why she believes the most important part of representing an injured person is first understanding who that person was before the injury, what changed, and what has truly been taken from them.

The medical records tell part of the story. They rarely tell all of it.

Malone Legal Group

Valeri practices with her husband, attorney Matt Malone, at Malone Legal Group.

The firm was intentionally built differently from a high-volume personal-injury practice. Valeri believes serious cases require personal involvement, careful preparation, and a willingness to learn the client’s life, not simply process a claim.

Malone Legal Group represents individuals and families in cases involving catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, commercial trucking collisions, traumatic brain injuries, defective products, dangerous premises, industrial accidents, institutional negligence, and other serious injuries.

Valeri approaches every significant case with a simple principle:

The insurance company should understand not only what it will cost to settle the case, but what it will have to face if the case is tried.

That requires knowing the evidence, knowing the medicine, knowing the client, and being prepared to tell the client’s story to a jury.

For Valeri, that preparation begins long before anyone enters a courtroom.

In her life and in her practice, Valeri lives by a simple philosophy captured in her favorite Babe Ruth quote:

“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”