Meet Adam Reposa, the Texas lawyer who maintains the website www.dwibadass.com and has a penchant for putting out over-the-top YouTube videos promoting his Austin-based solo criminal defense practice.
In one commercial, Reposa, wearing a black cowboy hat with his suit and sporting elaborate facial hair, destroys a red Chrysler Cirrus with his white pickup truck. “America is about freedom. And every time I look and see somebody try to stop enjoying their freedom, all I can think is WHY ARE YOU IN MY WAY?” Reposa screams.
“The video is quite subtle. But I think the main message is if you stand in his way in court, he will run you over with his pickup truck,” Christopher Danzig wrote in a post titled “You Should Probably Get Out of Adam Reposa’s Way” at Above the Law in May.
Texas Lawyer Blog‘s John Council tracked down Reposa to ask him for the commercial’s backstory: “What happened was: I had a concept for an ad that was going to be pretty simple. I’ve shot and edited it. It was supposed to be very simple: ‘I’m Adam Reposa. I am a lawyer. Don’t get in the way of my truck,” Reposa told Council. He then explained that the Chrysler was nonfunctional, and the pickup truck, given to him by a client, was “expensive on gas.”
Another commercial shows Reposa wandering around outside a convenience store clutching a Double Gulp and repeating the phrase “I am a lawyer” sixteen times. (A more polished Reposa can be seen in a video posted in April, in which he tones down his act and speaks passionately about his profession to a group of high school students at a career day.)
Reposa lays out his legal philosophy on his website:
My first goal is to fight the hardest cases. I prefer to take the cases that most lawyers consider not winnable if taken to jury trial. I have honed my skills as a lawyer and built my credibility fighting – and at times winning — the hardest cases.
My second goal is to win the most criminal trials of any lawyer in Austin. This is accomplished by taking easy cases all the way to trial to get an acquittal rather than working out a plea bargain. I squeeze the most out of every case even if it upsets the judge and the prosecutors. …
I hope that litigating a case against me is agonizing and tedious.
Reposa may have a knack for untraditional, yet attention-grabbing, antics, but they have gotten him in trouble in the past. The UT Law grad is a member of the Texas Bar but was held in contempt of court in 2008 for making “a simulated masturbatory gesture with his hand while making eye contact with the court.”
