The Great Defenders
How did natty, flashy Dick DeGuerin and his quiet, determined brother, Mike, become two of the best lawyers in Texas? By learning everything they could from their mentor, the legendary Percy Foreman.
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It was always a temptation to reduce the big man to a single comic-book dimension, but there was much more to Foreman than met the eye. True, he charged high fees, but never as enormous as reported: It was a tactic to screen out the nuisance cases, and he handled many clients for little or nothing. (He also enjoyed referring plum cases to attorneys he liked and wacko cases to those he despised.) His pride in his murder-case record was matched by his fervent moral opposition to capital punishment—which, he once caustically remarked, “should not only be on television but be sponsored by the Texas Power and Light Company, which supplies the juice.” And for all the millions he made in divorce cases, he forfeited millions more by turning such clients away. “In many cases,” says his former associate Lewis Dickson, “he set out after the husband with such an insulting fervor that he accomplished his ultimate purpose, which was to get them back together. He saved a lot of marriages.” In one such case, a wealthy River Oaks woman answered Foreman’s question “Why are you seeking a divorce?” with the answer “I’m just not happy.” Foreman roared, “You don’t need a lawyer! You need a pharmacist! You’ll never find someone who treats you as well as this man does! Now get out of my office!” The woman remains married to this day.
That first sight of Foreman in the courthouse dizzied Dick DeGuerin, but it did not change him overnight. He was a bright but easily bored young man, the kind of student who vexed teachers because he would not apply himself. His father, Elias McDowell DeGeurin, was an oil and gas lawyer and LBJ confidante who urged his son to pursue a career in politics, but all that glad-handing looked to be a bit much. Mainly he enjoyed reading Shakespeare, drinking beer, and visiting the Chicken Ranch whorehouse in La Grange. Upon graduating from the University of Texas, DeGuerin applied for a job at the FBI, which turned him down on the grounds that he had once been arrested for trying to climb a parade float that carried Governor Price Daniel. So he entered UT Law School, imagining himself as an international lawyer, chasing French girls and whatnot.
In 1965 DeGuerin got his law degree. He followed his law school buddies to Houston, where the action was, where Percy Foreman was. He sought employment from each of the big firms, who wanted experienced trial lawyers or top-of-the-class graduates. DeGuerin was neither. A family connection got him an interview with Harris County district attorney Frank Briscoe. The meeting went well, and DeGuerin was handed a formal application to fill out. The back page, which questioned the applicant’s criminal record, had for some reason not reproduced. DeGuerin got the job.
For three years DeGuerin honed his chops prosecuting Harris County criminals. As an assistant DA he was not a standout, except by virtue of his youthful appearance. “He was so pretty, with Ivy League clothes and a cute little ol’ butt,” snickers Erwin Ernst, the veteran first assistant DA during DeGuerin’s brief tenure. “We all played like we were lusting after little Dickie till he’d turn red in the face.” Still, DeGuerin worked hard, particularly so on a narcotics case that pitted him against Percy Foreman. The cocky young prosecutor strode into the courthouse that day, certain of victory, until his star witness, a police officer, was cross-examined by Foreman. By the time Foreman spat the officer back out, DeGuerin was mesmerized, even in defeat.
In 1968 Dick DeGuerin took a shot at big-bucks lawyering and hired on with Butler and Binion’s trial division. DeGuerin enjoyed some of the general litigation cases, especially “one case where a lawyer was claiming that drinking a bottle of wine bought at a grocery store insured by us had given him hemorrhoids,” he says. “I had his doctor draw the man’s hemorrhoid on a chalkboard.” He also benefitted from the tutelage of senior partner Frank Knapp, the head of the firm’s trial division. But the 27-year-old attorney had cultivated a rebel streak that chafed against the tweedy grain of Butler and Binion. DeGuerin sometimes rode a motorcycle to work and could be seen walking down the hallway in his Penney’s work shirt, briefcase in one hand, helmet in the other. He hated the insurance adjusters. In 1971, as a diversion from his regular work, DeGuerin offered to represent an attorney friend, Bob Tarrant, who had been arrested on weapons charges. Also volunteering to help was Percy Foreman. DeGuerin worked long hours on his friend’s behalf. The old man was impressed. Halfway during the trial, Foreman leaned over and whispered into the younger man’s ear, “Do you enjoy working for insurance companies?”
“No,” DeGuerin assured him. “I enjoy doing this.”
“Would you rather represent people than insurance companies?” Foreman persisted.
“I sure would.”
“Well, then,” said Foreman, “come see me.”
Later, DeGuerin showed up at Foreman’s shabby two-room office in the First National Life Building, now known as 806 Main. There the legendary Percy Foreman offered him a job. DeGuerin was shocked and told Foreman he would have to think it over, which seemed to throw the old man a bit. DeGuerin had just turned thirty. He talked to his boss, Jack Binion. Binion didn’t mince words. “If you don’t go with Percy,” he said, “then you’re a damn fool.”
DeGuerin accepted Foreman’s offer but told him, “What I’d like is for the firm to be known as Foreman and DeGuerin.” Foreman agreed without hesitation.
The old man was a workhorse who enjoyed nothing like he enjoyed his practice. He loathed physical activity of any kind and saw socializing as a waste of time. DeGuerin found this out just after starting work, when Bob Tarrant invited him to Baja California for a four-day bacchanal. Foreman was not amused and told DeGuerin he would rather the young attorney didn’t go. DeGuerin went anyway. When he returned, there was a long letter sitting on his desk. “When you impressed me during the Bob Tarrant case,” it read, “I mistook your efforts for a love of the law. Now I think it was all because you were a good friend of Bob Tarrant’s…For me, practicing law is the be-all and end-all. I don’t practice law to take vacations and play golf.” The letter concluded by informing DeGuerin that his pay would be docked for the two days of work he missed.
DeGuerin knew a challenge when he saw one. “I poured myself into the next case, days and nights and weekends,” he says. After DeGuerin won, he was summoned to the old man’s office. Foreman looked up at him with a satisfied smile. Then he leaned to one side, reached deep into his front pockets—which were custom-designed to be knee length, since Foreman distrusted banks and carried his cash on his person—and pulled out a wad of dollar bills. DeGuerin counted the money he was handed. It was his two days’ worth of docked pay.
Foreman and DeGuerin was Dick DeGuerin’s firm in name only. The old man called all the shots. He expected everyone to be at work at eight-thirty on weekday mornings, ten on Saturdays. He selected and assigned all the cases. He set and collected all the fees, from which DeGuerin was paid a salary. The houses, cars, jewels, ranches, weapons, silk umbrellas, and elephants that came to the firm in collateralized fees went to Percy Foreman, who warehoused the goods and kept the accounting of them strictly to himself. At one time, Foreman owned more than forty automobiles, none of them purchased by him. At another time, he was said to be the largest private landowner in Harris County.
Foreman was not an easy man to work for. A former associate from the fifties, George Greene, Jr., remembers that in 1954, “Percy went through thirteen secretaries in a single year. He was under so much pressure, because he was seeing maybe fifty clients and trying five or six cases every day, that he had absolutely no patience for people who were slow or error-prone. He expected you to anticipate his every need.” By the time DeGuerin joined the business, Foreman, nearly seventy, was not as brisk, but he was still, as his friend Joe Jamail puts it, “a piece of shit to work for.” It was a common occurrence for him to fire his longtime secretary, Martha Allen, who would simply tune Foreman out and continue her chores.
DeGuerin was not born with a sturdy work ethic, but under Percy Foreman he developed one. He learned, during his short briefings with the impatient lawyer, “how to boil something down to its essence, which of course is a really important skill when you’re explaining something to a jury.” He learned that the business of trial law was trying cases, not pleading them, and that this often meant playing hardball with his old pals over at the DA’s office. He learned how to use the press to force answers out of the police, and how to salvage a little goodwill with the police by giving them occasional pro bono legal assistance. Above all, he learned the value of reading people: knowing when a juror remains unpersuaded, when a witness is ready to crater, when a prosecutor is bluffing, when a client is lying.
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