| He may be the richest lawyer in
America, but even at 78 Joe Jamail shows no signs of slowing
down. The King is 45 minutes late when he walks out of the
elevator and into his penthouse office, high atop 500 Dallas
Street in Houston. His pace is slow and regal through the lobby,
as he is being politely acknowledged by his staff. He doesn't
need to explain where he's been. After all, he is a man who
claims more trial victories than anyone else, ever. A man who
forced the withdrawal of three products from the marketplace
because he deemed them dangerous. A man who won the largest
civil damage award in history. A man whose legal victories are
so astounding and groundbreaking that he was acknowledged in the
Guinness Book of World Records. But this is no mere man.
This is Joe Jamail King of Torts
Newsweek bestowed that moniker upon
Jamail in the early 1970s after he won a half-million-dollar
jury award for his client, an electrician who had lost his hands
because of a faulty electrical box. It was the first time in
American tort law that an individual had received a verdict with
so many zeros on the cashier's check, and it forever helped
change Texas law concerning product liability At the completion
of that trial, Jamail's career began to escalate, and, always
working on a percentage basis, his war chest started filling up
fast. And you can bet the media took notice.
Jamail has loved every minute of it. "Hey,
man, I'm a ham. I love this stuff," he says with a laugh. He
relishes the spotlight and talks about his past battles as if
they were playing out right in from of him. The smile that
creases his face never wavers while he recalls the countless
highlights of his legendary career, which has grown to
near-mythic proportions.
After attending to some business, he
finally settles into a brass rocking chair. In a pressed blue
jacket, Jamail measures his every word like a man contemplating
the virtues of a fine martini. He is 78 years old, and his blue
eyes sometimes appear a bit clouded in the sunshine streaming
through the windows. But they also convey a solid willingness to
continue practicing and winning which is very bad news for you
if you happen to come up against him in court.
"I'll be honest with you, when you're a
winner and I've won so much they tend to publicize it,
glamorize it, romanticize it....You know everybody's looking for
a hero, Jamail says when asked about the king's crown he was
presented by his colleagues in deference to his media coronated
royalty. "I'm not sure any of it means anything except that I've
been able to be really advantageous for my clients. And me. I've
made a lot of money"
 Yeah.
That's true. About a billion dollars or so. His name is usually
found on the list of wealthiest Americans by Forbes
magazine, where he has also been cited as the country's
highest-paid plaintiff's lawyer. But Houston's native son says
there's nothing for him to he ashamed of because he's made his
money honestly while helping out people who would otherwise end
up shafted by greedy and irresponsible corporations.
"I'm not saying money's bad. I like it. But
there are no vaults where I'm going. Up or down. So I try to
give back because there's just so much money you can spend. you
know? There's just so much you can eat and drink." He leans in,
pulls the room together with his sly smile and knowing wink,
then clarifies: "Good drink, that is."
Oh, yes, the King likes to imbibe on
occasion. In fact, a morning's worth of Jamail's stories tends
to start out the same way: "I was drinking with a couple of my
buddies when ...
For instance, where was he when he was
first inspired to become a lawyer? In a saloon in Lafayette,
Louisiana, trying to score with the barmaid when an attorney
named Kaliste Soloom intervened to spark Jamail's curiosity
about the law.
Where was he when he decided to take the
bar exam on a dare -- with only three days to prepare? Drinking
off-campus with some law school buddies. He passed by one point
-- and boisterously claimed that he had overtrained for the test
then headed right back out to celebrate.
Where was he the night before he was to
deliver his closing arguments in the historic Pennzoil versus
Texaco trial? Drinking with Willie Nelson and former University
of Texas football coach Darrell Royal. "Willie and Darrell
showed up in a white stretch limousine and started pounding on
the front door They kept me up drinking and bullshitting past
midnight," says Jamail.
Despite that highly unusual all-night
liquid strategy session, Jamail still nailed the summation and
cemented his footprints into the legal walk of fame with the
verdict that followed.
By now, a trainload of ink has been spilled
over that trial, and Jamail still considers it the shining jewel
in his crown. It took place in the mid-1980s, a period often
perceived as a decade of greed. Getting a jury to care about two
big oil companies fighting over more money seemed a daunting
task. What's more, there would be substantial testimony of Wall
Street dealings and business acquisitions and a whole mess of
other financial stuff that might confuse or bore a jury.
Jamail was representing Pennzoil, who
claimed that Texaco knowingly savaged its deal to take over
Getty Oil. He agonized for weeks over how to argue it. Finally,
he found the clarity he was seeking and saw the situation as a
matter of honor, and that's the foundation with which he chose
his picks for the jury "[Pennzoil] didn't have a signed
contract, but we had a word. We had a handshake. So I was
looking for people with long marriages, long church affiliations
... people whose word meant something," says Jamail. "I had to
try to make them understand that they didn't give up their
common sense when they got to court. And it worked for me."
Oh, it worked all right. Jamail compelled
the jury to get excited enough to send a warning shot across the
bow of every company in America that morality and ethics have a
place in business just as they have in life's other arenas. And
it was a big shot. The largest legal shot in history, in fact.
It was an $11 billion shot, and, of course, Jamail got a
lawyer-sized cut of the award. (And even though the case was
ultimately settled for $3 billion, that's still a lot more money
than most attorneys will rack up in a lifetime of litigating.)
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Jamail was born in 1925. That's possibly why he's so passionate
about what he does and about whom he chooses to look after.
Though his family wasn't terribly impacted by the events of the
late 1920s and early 1930s, he still lived through the Great
Depression and witnessed how people treated their neighbors in
times of crisis. As he remembers it, his parents were always
willing to feed a stranger passing through town looking for
work, and their compassionate spirit has remained hard-wired
into his quest for justice.
After serving as a Marine in the Pacific
during World War II, he returned home and started taking pre-med
classes, but soon changed to law at the University of Texas.
That's where his unusual approach to the profession began.
Jamail says that he was so naive at the time that he didn't
realize that he needed to take an exam to get into the law
school. He simply showed up and started taking classes.
His grades weren't stupendous at first, but
his desire and his talent were apparent very early. In fact, he
actually tried a case before graduating. You see, Jamail was
drinking with a couple of buddies in a favorite bar when the
bartender cut herself on a beer bottle that she was trying to
open.
"I told her we should just sue and see what
happens," Jamail recalls. He admits to being a little lost in
court, which is understandable since he didn't even have a
degree yet, but the judge guided him through the proceedings.
When the defendant, Pearl Brewing Company offered $500 to
settle, Jamail asked for $ 1,000. He ended up taking $750 and
collecting a third of it for his fee. which naturally was used
to buy beers for his friends all night long.
After graduating, he took a job at Freeman,
Bates & Jaworski. "I lasted about 20 minutes in that kind of
corporate law-by-committee environment," Jamail says. He then
went to work for the district attorney's office and fine-tuned
his chops while working on every kind of case, including murder
and the strange case of a man having sex with his mule.
Jamail eventually formed his own practice,
where he could take the cases he wanted and handle them his own
way, which at times veered toward the unbelievable. He
immediately grabbed headlines with a case he won for the widow
of a man who had been drinking and drove his car into a tree.
After Jamail was through, the city paid the widow and cut down
the tree.
 WORTHY
OF THE THRONE
He's charming and talented, but Jamail is also a warrior. Hes
extremely hard-working and thorough when preparing for a case.
"When you really prepare and that's one of the things that I'm
noted for: I really get ready then it looks like it's
all coming right off the top of your head. But look, the only
thing that comes off the top of your head is dandruff. So I
drive everybody around here nuts picking apart every little
thing, says Jamail. "Anybody who thinks they're smart enough to
go to court and the Holy Ghost is going to descend upon them
with all the knowledge they need to win is ... goofy. It just
doesn't happen like that. If you're not prepared, you're just
not gonna win."
Today the man knows a lot about winning and
outright success. He has a leather-bound book of victory
clippings thick enough to be a doorstop at the gates of
Buckingham Palace. If you own a Remington Mohawk 600 rifle or a
three-wheeled Honda all-terrain vehicle, then you bought it
before Jamail personally had them, along with the drug Parlodel,
completely recalled because of the inherent dangers they posed.
His trophy room is crammed with awards, honors and testimonials.
There are statues of him around town, and the football field at
Texas Memorial Stadium sports his name. Jamail, though, is
particularly proud that his peers at the California Trial
Lawyers Association named him "Trial Lawyer of the Century"
But all that happened last century. What
about now? "I'm starting out pretty good on it," says Jamail,
who has a full docket for the foreseeable future. "I like
knowing that I'm helping somebody and I like the courthouse. It
beats selling bananas. And that's what I would have been doing
if not for this."
The discussion swings toward the current
political climate which he is none too happy with and what he
perceives as an erosion of civil liberties. He then leans in to
make his last point crystal clear and the soon-to-be
octogenarian assumes the role of warrior king again. "There's
never been a bigger assault on people's privacy and their
liberties and on the Constitution itself ... because of some
hocus-pocus cry of `war-time president!' thereby revoking all
our constitutional guarantees. Give me a break. I don't believe
that. I don't like that and I'm not going to put up with that.
I'm going to fight that."
But now the King rises. He is off to
receive guests for lunch, and he's just a little bit late. It's
a good bet that wherever he goes he'll probably have a couple of
drinks, and who knows? Maybe he'll figure out how to save the
Constitution. Long live the King.
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