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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In 1972 one of the biggest Houston cases in years came into the office: the case of Lilla Paulus, accused of conspiring to murder Dr. John Hill following the bizarre death of his wife, Joan Robinson Hill. Foreman told his young associate, “It’s yours.” The trial, immortalized by Thomas Thompson’s book Blood and Money, was DeGuerin’s first case under the full unsparing glare of the media spotlight. Despite an at-times-dazzling performance, DeGuerin lost. By asking for a continuance, he gave the prosecutors a chance to work a deal with Paulus’ co-conspirator, Marcia McKittrick, and her testimony proved to be damaging. Foreman had advised DeGuerin against the continuance; but he had also insisted that DeGuerin put Paulus on the stand, and against DeGuerin’s better judgment, he did so. That proved to be the fatal error, since the prosecutors destroyed Paulus with evidence they had gotten from McKittrick.
“Well, you did your best,” Foreman told his dejected associate, “and now we’ve got to see about a reversal.” After a five-year appellate period, DeGuerin won a reversal of Paulus’ 35-year prison sentence. He never discussed Foreman’s poor judgment on the case; he simply took notice of the fact that even the old man was fallible. In 1974 Foreman himself stood trial on a charge of driving while intoxicated. Every high-profile lawyer in the nation offered his pro bono services. Foreman selected Dick DeGuerin. It was as high an honor as Percy Foreman could possibly bestow. Today DeGuerin discusses the case with fresh zeal. ‘“We had this great defense,” he enthuses. “See, Percy had been diabetic since 1954. He was probably as drunk as he could be, but the fact is, when you’re having a diabetic attack, you act drunk—even to the extent of giving off an odor that’s just like alcohol. So it was a five-day trial. I built it up this way: First I brought on the police officer and the kids who were eyewitnesses, and I got them all to admit that they’d never seen a diabetic attack and therefore wouldn’t be able to tell it from drunkenness. Then I bring up Percy’s doctor, who testifies that Percy’s diabetic. And then I bring up the Harris County medical examiner, Dr. Jachimczyk. And he testified that not only did he know Percy personally and knew he had diabetes, but that several times in the past, Houston police officers had mistaken diabetic attacks for being alcohol-related and threw them in jail, where they died! Perfect testimony!
“And that’s the setting for when Percy took the stand.”
The legendary lawyer was everything he had always instructed his clients not to be. He sat on the witness stand, his arms folded tightly against his massive chest, glowering. To the prosecutor, a nice fellow named Mike Maguire, Foreman snarled, “I hear they call you Young Cassius.” He volunteered that he was not only not drunk that particular day, but in fact, “I’ve never been drunk a day in my life.” He was a study in arrogance. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to probation.
DeGuerin and Foreman walked back to the car in silence. The young lawyer knew the old man had dug his own grave, but DeGuerin had developed his own perfectionist streak under Foreman’s tutelage and now tormented himself thinking of ways he could have salvaged a victory. “Look, I’m sorry,” he began, but Foreman cut him off. “Don’t worry about it,” grunted the old man, and they drove back to the office together and did not discuss the case again.
“Sibling rivalry is one of the most recognized normal negative traits in our society,” says 49-year-old Michael DeGeurin as he sits in the chair that was once the property of his mentor. “Dick and I are unusual siblings in that we’re each other’s best friends. So in thinking about whether or not to work in my brother’s practice, I was only apprehensive in this sense: ‘Will I measure up?’ “
The physical similarities between the brothers are just enough to accent the differences. “Mike isn’t as precious as Dickie,” says Erwin Ernst, by way of understatement: The younger brother is short, he is gravelly voiced from his cigarette habit, and he wears suits that are wrinkled and somewhat ill-fitting. His office has the orderly appearance of a broom closet. Accordion files dominate the floor and yellow Post-it notes cover the edges of his desk, which is heaped with pleadings and notepads. Where Dick DeGuerin has taken the Percy Foreman style and added a few coats of gloss, Mike DeGeurin has stripped the style down to its most primitive hide. Here at Foreman’s firm, the work gets done just as Percy would have it, but no cameras, please. As in the old days, clients sit for hours in the waiting room, attended to by Martha Allen, Foreman’s longtime secretary. Mike DeGeurin never charges an initial consultation fee, and he always makes a point of “leaving people who come into our office better off than when they came in, whether we represent them or not,” he says. That’s the way Percy Foreman did things.
On the wall of the waiting room, the sign used to read “Foreman & DeGuerin.” Now it says “Foreman, DeGeurin & Nugent” (Paul Nugent joined the firm in 1985), and below the words hangs a framed black and white oil painting of the old man seated atop a desk, and behind him a quiet and respectful presence, Mike DeGeurin. The family name on the firm logo is now spelled Mike’s way. It is he who stayed behind.
“Mike is more of a diplomat than I am,” says Dick DeGuerin. “He’d rather get people to agree.” It is Mike, the conciliating little brother, who is best loved among the state’s judges, while it is Dick who has the reputation of a man who doesn’t care who he offends. It is the difficult older brother who felt compelled to change the spelling of his surname. It is Mike who was praised by their father for his quiet loyalty: “I know of no one who can keep a secret better than you,” he told him. Houston attorney David Berg calls Mike DeGeurin “the most underrated lawyer in Harris County”—a tag that could not possibly apply to the older brother, for all his deft manipulation of the news media. When Dick represented Mike in a landmark withholding-of-privileged-information case in 1990, the older brother insisted that they ram the case down the U.S. attorneys’ throats. Mike reluctantly agreed, but he was adamant that his name be kept out of the pleadings and was more than happy to leave most of the interviews to Dick.
All the same, Mike DeGeurin possesses the little brother’s determination. After finishing law school—far surpassing Dick in his grades—he clerked for a state judge and then a federal judge, then went searching for work in Houston. Dick offered to get him a job at the DA’s office; with his connections, it would be a cinch. Mike DeGeurin refused. “I can take the most awful person and after thirty minutes with him, come up with more good in him than there is bad,” he says. “I just couldn’t see myself pointing my finger at that person in trial and telling the jury to send that person away. The idea of developing my skills and getting practice by prosecuting some poor soul didn’t appeal to me.”
DeGeurin hired on at the public defender’s office, where his performance was closely monitored by Foreman. In 1976 the old man said he wanted to hire Mike, starting next week. “I can’t do it,” DeGeurin told him. “I’ve got five or six cases scheduled for trial. These people are counting on me.” Foreman grumbled, “Son, you’re building a hell of a foundation as a lawyer. But someday you need to get off the first floor.” Still, he appreciated the young man’s priorities. A few months later, the old man offered the job again and Mike DeGeurin snatched it up.
By 1982 Foreman and DeGuerin did more criminal law business than any firm in the state. In addition to Mike DeGeurin, the firm had added Charles Szekely and Lewis Dickson. Foreman was now eighty and seldom made appearances in court. “He quit trying cases,” recalls Ernst, “and let the boys try ‘em.” Rumors drifted through the courthouse that the old man had lost it. The boys knew better. When Foreman told Dickson to get a bid from ABC Bonding Company, Dickson thought, “Well, bless his heart, his memory’s failing. We always do business with ABD Bonding.” Dickson took it upon himself to call ABD. When Foreman got wind of this, he charged into the young attorney’s office and hollered through clenched teeth, “I told you ABC, not ABD! A-B-C-D-E-F-G…” He proceeded to recite, at top volume, the entire alphabet in Dickson’s sheepish face.
For years, Dick DeGuerin had stewed quietly while his peers, less talented than he, were raking in the dough. Foreman always paid him well, but not nearly as well as DeGuerin’s talents were padding the pockets of the old man. “Unless you make me ten times what I pay you,” DeGuerin was told, “you’re not worth it to me.” DeGuerin was well aware that the big firms were content with profit margins of around 20 percent. “I never knew what the bottom line was—Percy kept that to himself,” he says today. “But I know that I made Percy millions and millions of dollars.”
The stylistic differences between them bespoke their separate generations. Foreman did his afternoon work at the Old Capitol Club, where the waiters brought him a private phone and a succession of scotch and sodas. DeGuerin didn’t care much for the joint: It was filled with geezers who bragged about how they had never lost a case. DeGuerin spent his early mornings jogging, which Foreman found unfathomable. Worse, the jogging routine often caused DeGuerin to be late to the 8:30 meeting, an outrageous flouting of office procedure Dick DeGuerin committed repeatedly, as if hell-bent on getting the old man’s goat. Then there were the first-class airplane tickets and hotel suites DeGuerin charged to the firm. It was the young attorney’s way of asserting his right to the high life. But Foreman, who fought his way out of the Depression, was apoplectic over this abuse of office funds. He promptly circulated a memo banning all luxury purchases and forced each attorney to initial it.
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