Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
HOUSTON LAW
HOUSTON LAW
Three of the nation's largest law firms are in Houston. They have kept their awesome power, their pervasive influence, and their closed societies out of the public eye. Until now.
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There are some areas of the law the big firms will not touch, principally divorce work, criminal defense work, and plaintiffs' personal injury cases. Mention to a partner in one of the Big Six that you would like him to handle your divorce, and he will react as though he has just discerned an unpleasant odor in the room. In rare instances involving a valued client, a personal friend, or an extraordinarily enticing fee, this rule may be suspended, but for the general public the big firms will politely suggest taking your divorce elsewhere. Percy Foreman is the acknowledged grand sachem in the divorce field.
Criminal defense work is regarded as far, far worse, a sullying pastime if ever there was one, and. . .well, not very lucrative either. There is no point in a criminal defendant's ever stepping aboard the elevator to one of the Big Six unless he happens to enjoy heights, or he has, by the luck of the draw, been assigned one of their lawyers by the court because he is indigent. (This sometimes happens, and occasionally a big firm lawyer whose practice is exclusively civil will acquit himself—and his client—brilliantly. Leon Jaworski at Fulbright Crooker argues forcefully that lawyers should welcome the professional duty of representing accused indigents, and has done so himself in state court cases). The day-to-day criminal law practice however, is handled by a largely penurious cross-section of specialists. Percy Foreman and his motorcycle-riding, pipe-smoking rival, Racehorse Haynes, are the most prominent criminal defense lawyers in the neighborhood.
Representation of plaintiffs in personal injury lawsuits is potentially the most lucrative branch of the law, but the big firms are effectively precluded from entering it because they already represent the defendants—manufacturers, railroads, insurance companies—who are being sued. It is a feast-or-famine business, but the feasts are regal indeed. One Houston lawyer who specializes in products liability cases (injuries caused by defective products) has two verdicts of more than $1.5 million to his credit, one over $1.6 million, and fifty over $100,000. The usual fee for successful representation in a personal injury case is about 30 per cent of the recovery, plus expenses. Handsome. The firm of Kronzer, Abraham & Watkins is generally regarded as the top personal injury firm in town, but Joe Jamail, the driving force behind the tiny firm of Jamail & Gano, is unquestionably the leading individual personal injury lawyer.
Any member of a bar association grievance committee will confirm that the vast majority of unethical practices are committed by lawyers on the fringes of divorce work, criminal law, and personal injury work. An observer of the Houston scene laments the reluctance of the big firms to become involved in these branches of the law (or at least in divorce and criminal cases, where no problems of conflict of interest arise). "If the large firms came down and got involved, the overall quality of the work would improve dramatically, I'm sure," he says. "They have the ability and they know what an ethical lawyer is supposed to do. But they're not interested because they're afraid they'll get themselves dirty. It's a vicious circle. And the reputation of all us lawyers, good and bad, gets hurt by it."
A variety of excellent smaller firms specialize in more or less esoteric branches of the law. Dixie, Wolf & Hall is the leader in the field of labor law on the unions' side and Neel & Hooper is highly regarded on the employers' side. Royston, Rayzor, Cook & Vickery is the top admiralty firm; like Butler Binion it is notably proficient at producing federal judges, including Carl Bue, a district judge, and John Brown, colorful chief judge of the Fifth Circuit. Arnold White & Durkee take their hats off to no one in the patent law field. Sheinfeld, Maley & Kay is excellent in bankruptcy cases. And there are several outstanding firms approaching 20 lawyers with a more general civil practice, including Hutcheson & Grundy; Childs, Fortenbach, Beck & Guyton; Liddell, Sapp, Zivley & Brown; Sewell, Junell & Riggs; and Foreman, Dyess, Prewett, Rosenburg & Henderson. Each is competitive with the giants, and each feels the pinch on legal business that the big firms' domination causes. There are, in addition, a number of solo practitioners and three- or four-man firms who vigorously defend their way of doing things. Many of them—too many to mention—are quite able. But the Big Three remain the singular, dominant feature of the Houston legal landscape.
Baker & Botts: Doing the Deity's Work
FOR MANY YEARS BAKER & BOTTS was the largest and most prestigious of the Houston law firms; until the late 1920s it held a virtual monopoly on the city's desirable law business, except for the share claimed by Andrews Kurth. From this commanding position it has now slipped in size to a somewhat distant third. But it has lost none of its classy reputation.
There is something remote. . .foreign. . .even Yankee. . .about Baker & Botts, despite its undeniable pedigree in the Houston establishment. From its earliest days it has been the East Coast's team in southeast Texas, representing Northern brokerage houses, utilities, lumber companies and other absentee landlords, and railroads. From the 1870s to the 1930s, when the Southwest was just another province in an economic system that was centralized in the East, these interests required trustworthy lawyers to cultivate their Texas gardens, and they found them. Baker & Botts grew with its clients. One of their most prized documents is an original hand-written $10,000 retainer from a corporate predecessor of the Southern Pacific Railroad, dated 1872, six years after the law firm was founded in the wreckage of the war-torn South. The partner who handles Southern Pacific's business today preserves it in his files.
None of the other Houston firms has anything like this sort of tradition. It sustains the B&B lawyer in his serene detachment, a detachment that in turn goads other lawyers to mutter sourly of, "the Baker-Botts halo" and dream of puncturing the self-righteous aura that surrounds the firm. Ask a member of Baker & Botts about his competitors and you will hear a scornful series of Olympian thunderbolts, two-thirds serious, concerning everyone but Andrews Kurth, the one firm to whom B&B graciously extends full diplomatic recognition because (some say) it is the only group of lawyers not suspected of scheming to lure away a valued client or two. He views his firm as "national" rather than regional, the equal (which in many ways it is) of practitioners in New York or Philadelphia.
Lawyers at Vinson Elkins and Fulbright Crooker are equally convinced of the superiority of their own firms, but they do not express their feelings with the same self-assured air of patrician certainty as the B&B man does. He seems satisfied to believe that his soul remains in Wall Street, Greenwich, Westchester, or Cape Cod, while his body has been temporarily assigned to these steamy Gulf Coast marshes in furtherance of the Deity's inscrutable barristerial design.
A strict sense of legal professionalism is the dominant concept—critics would call it an obsession—at Baker & Botts. More than any other of the Big Three, the firm scorns partisan political activity. Young associates are rigorously chosen for their grades and rank in class ("mental gear," says one). It is the firm least likely to be caught in a conflict of interest. It is also the firm least likely to have welcomed retiring Governor John Connally into its fold-in fact, they instinctively wouldn't have done it. We have a very formalized set of procedures around here," remarked one B&B member. "To bring someone in from The Outside—anyone—just upsets our traditional way of doing things." Secrecy about the firm is almost a fetish; the managing partner never bothered to return calls or acknowledge letters from Texas Monthly requesting an interview. Said a young associate: "It's just imprudent, unwise, and very unBottsian to talk to the press." Baker & Botts prides itself on the fact that it has never sued a client over an unpaid bill. From this tight little island the severest censure that can be hurled at another lawyer is the epithet, "unprofessional."
Baker & Botts' offices occupy all of the 29th, 30th, and 31st floors (and parts of two others) in Houston's tallest skyscraper, One Shell Plaza. A swift ascent in the building's famous leather-lined elevators [TM: Briar Patch, May, 1973] deposits the visitor in a tastefully modernistic world of Vasarely wall hangings, glass tables, and stylish furniture. The rich blond wood called prima vera that panels the walls grows in just a single Central American country and represents (so the story goes) more than half the total world's supply. It is worth whatever they paid for it. The decor, so different from the traditional dark intimidating law office atmosphere, provides a cheerful feeling of airiness and openness.
Presiding over this legal department store is the most able group of senior partners in the city. Baker & Botts has its share of deadwood at the top—patriarchs who make $250,000 a year and do virtually no productive work—but one of the signal advantages of a giant firm is that it can afford to put its superannuated partners out to pasture as civic front men. (Similarly, lawyers who turn out to be duds can be hidden away as workhorses who never tarnish the reputation of the firm by coming into contact with clients or the courts.) The majority of B&B's senior partners are exceptionally fine, and among them power is more diffused than it is at Fulbright Crooker or Vinson Elkins.
Three men, however, stand out within the ruling executive committee: William Harvin, George Jewell, and John Mackin. Harvin is the mandarin of mandarins—a formidable trial lawyer who acts as managing partner. Associates view him as a frustrated corporate lawyer, a man who would be more at home in the gilded world of conference rooms and Boards of Directors. He keeps his cards close to his vest. Brilliant, poised, and cold-blooded, he first came to B&B as an associate whose mother was the firm's office manager. The anti-nepotism rules that prevented founder James A. Baker's great-grandson from joining the firm that bears his name (he went instead to Andrews Kurth, of course) did not apply to the sons of employees; and Harvin, bred in the firm as few others have been, has become perhaps its most tenaciously loyal leader.
Jewell runs the tax department. Affable and tough, he has leapfrogged over a score of older partners to reach his present position. Ability got him there.
Mackin is regarded as something of an enigma by everyone. A widely read man, he is powerful because his department (the corporate section) is itself so powerful.
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