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.
(Page 4 of 10)
In fairness to Fulbright Crooker, one must readily admit that it is difficult to measure how much of this criticism is truly righteous indignation and how much is just mean-spirited professional jealousy. As the solo practitioner acknowledged, "These older firms know how to use power and they are pretty proud of it. When somebody else comes along who is able to do the same thing, they get knocked."
Even the harshest critics of the firm are quick to praise the caliber of its work in many areas. PC is nationally recognized for its insurance defense trial section, headed by Newton Gresham. "They're probably the best firm in the country in that field," says a University of Texas law professor. Their labor law section, headed by Larry Clinton, is "far and away the best in town." Their admiralty work is equally fine. And virtually every department is laced with men whose legal abilities match or exceed those of their rivals in other firms. Although Baker & Botts is considered pre-eminent in corporate financing and Vinson Elkins in oil & gas, the overall professional quality of the Big Three is remarkably close to being even.
Fulbright Crooker has also been something of a pioneer in chipping away racial barriers and other forms of discrimination. It hired its first Jewish lawyer about 15 years ago, well ahead of the other Big Six (one Jew did practice briefly at Baker & Botts in 1917). It is not the only firm to hire black law clerks in recent summers, but it topped all the rest by hiring a black girl and offering her an associateship at summer's end.
The firm is governed by a seven-member management committee, three of whom are among its most senior partners. But the dominant figure is Leon Jaworski, known to all as "the Colonel," who has been the committee's chairman for years. His rule is not the monolithic kind Judge Elkins practiced; other partners, particularly Krait Eidman and Gresham, possess real influence. Gibson Gayle is an up-and-coming figure. But Jaworski is the man that matters.
His corner office on the 8th floor of the Bank of the Southwest Building is cheerful, comfortable, and decorated as discreetly as possible with the avalanche of photographs, awards, and other memorabilia he has received during several decades of civic activity. (Students of the Houston skyline who associate elevation with status have noted that Baker & Botts looks down from its lofty perch on both of the other two, while Vinson Elkins has at least the satisfaction of looking down on Fulbright Crooker.) Sobriety is the keynote of the firm's reception. area, where leather chairs and oriental vases are balanced by bookcases containing rare editions of Smollett's History of England and bound volumes of The Spectator. The mood of traditionalism and affluence is enhanced by portraits of Jefferson and Marshall along with an original landscape painting or two (of English pastoral scenes—not Hill Country bluebonnets).
It is impossible to dislike Jaworski. A winning blend of Legal Lion and small-town Chamber-of-Commerce booster, he never gives you a chance. His enthusiasm for Fulbright Crooker is infectious. Although he has never been fully accepted by the old Houston legal and social establishment, he is exempted from the reproofs that they sometimes levy against his firm. "The Colonel," says one, "is still a man who has judgment."
"Our really phenomenal growth has been in the last decade," Jaworski says. From 56 members in 1955, the firm grew to 108 in 1965 and has reached 185 "as of today." He recalls that a meeting of the entire firm two years ago had to be held in the auditorium of the Humble Building, five blocks away, because there was no room large enough to hold everyone at the Bank. (If they had all marched down there together, one supposes they would have needed a parade permit.)
He is convinced that the big firms will keep on growing. "There's not a psychological barrier at 200," he says. "Years ago I said that when we reach 100 lawyers we ought to put on the brakes because we'll be getting too unwieldy. I could not have had a more complete misconception. Either you keep growing or you run the risk of stagnation."
Fulbright Crooker got its start in 1919 through the liaison of John H. Crooker and R. C. Fulbright, an expert in tax and transportation who spent much of his time in Washington, D.C. (The firm has had an office there from the beginning.) Their principal client was Anderson Clayton & Co., a cotton compress company which had the perspicacity to corner the world market in cotton after World War I. As far as the firm's vigor was concerned, having Anderson Clayton for a client was like having a lifetime supply of Gatorade. The company is an even bigger giant today, although it has switched to food processing, insurance, and vegetable oils. After a merger in the years following World War II that brought in a large amount of high-quality insurance defense work, FC began to grow in earnest. Clients included legendary oilman Glenn McCarthy, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, and the Second National Bank, now the Bank of the Southwest.
Jaworski surveys his firm as a benign father might contemplate his happy family. "I have never seen a team work together like these boys do," he beams. "Why, the way these boys pitch in and I help when someone else's ox is in the mire is amazing. They'll even stay down here at night." It is like being captain of the world's finest steamship.
Most vivid of all, perhaps, is his obvious, pardonably Texanish pride in the sheer bigness of it all—how it is booming, going great guns. "We've got men going all over the world," says the man who began his career when Houston was just another provincial city never dreaming that it might one day sit in the seats of the mighty. "We even have an office in London now." Did you send someone over there to run it? he is asked. "No, we didn't have to. About a year ago we got a man from Mobil Oil to head up the operation. He was already familiar with that part of the country."
How the Big Firms Got That Way: They're Big Because They're Big Because. . .
WHY HAS HOUSTON PRODUCED THESE immense law factories? The question is really two-fold: Why did they become so big? And why do they stay so big?
The conventional answer to the first question is that they grew because of their intimate associations with the big banks. This holds true for Vinson Elkins and Fulbright Crooker; for Baker & Botts, less so. But it is not far wrong with B&B, either. The banks generated a lot of business for their allied firms, and, more importantly, they sent a lot of business upstairs. Houston's banks have traditionally done business with a single firm, in contrast to those in Dallas which have parceled their business out and played one set of lawyers off against another. These different modes of operation were partly foreordained by the unusual way some Houston banks happened to develop: Judge Elkins' dual role as banker and lawyer is only the most obvious example.
An even more important reason, though, was the sheer forcefulness of the personalities who ruled the Big Three in their formative years. Men like Judge Elkins, John Crooker, and Captain Baker at Baker & Botts held the firms together by the strength of their own wills in the crucial 1920s and 1930s. The centrifugal forces that have held sway in Dallas—where the Turner firm reached 45 or 50 and split, the Carrington firm 30 or so and split—were held in check by these extraordinary men at precisely the time when their firms were still small enough to break apart. By avoiding the break then, they ensured it would probably never come.
As a partner at Vinson Elkins observed, "There comes a point of 'critical mass.' Beyond a certain point—perhaps 50 or so—large firms are so much more profitable because of the size of the clients they can attract and the specialization they can bring to bear." A group of partners could conceivably have walked off with half the clients of one of the Big Three in the Twenties; now they never could. One does not walk off with Texas Eastern, Pennzoil, or Anderson Clayton. They are too big to put in one's briefcase—and their loyalties now are to the firm itself and not to the lawyer who handles their business (or part of it) at a given moment. The real reason for the Big Three's size is to be found in history, rather than in anything that is happening today. It is no riddle to say, "They are big. . .because they are big."
This is not to deny that there are other forces helping to keep them big. Some of these are common to law practice in other major cities: the sustained boom in legal business for the past decade, dumping more work than they can handle on the major firms; Houston's own growth; and, fascinatingly, the introduction of the jet airplane. By making Washington and New York as accessible as Austin, it has opened up new vistas in branches of the law heretofore monopolized by firms along the Eastern seaboard—representation of clients before federal agencies like the Federal Power Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example. As VE partner Evans Attwell observes, "As late as the Fifties, the only way you could get up there was by taking a three-day train trip or flying an uncomfortable DC-6. Now you can leave in the morning, be in DC by noon, have your conference, and be home that night. It's opened up a whole new world of federal practice to us."
My Library
