A law firm devoted to civil appellate practice in all Texas courts of appeal, including the Texas Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Well, it means that in 2010, I got tired of representing big companies and faceless entities, and I decided to start representing people. But, here’s the thing, the stuff I’m best at is the kind of nerdy, cerebral argument that doesn’t come up in a
lot of cases. Your average car wreck case doesn’t have a heady issue buried in it; it just needs a solid trial lawyer. And, as much as I know I can do stuff like that, it wasn’t wasn’t what I wanted to do in the long run. So I started looking to the people I’d worked with and opposite of for years. And it turned out that they actually did need someone like me--someone with a little bit of a different take on cases; someone who could write; and someone with a courtroom presence in legal argument--the kind of self-assurance that can blow the doors off an opponent’s legal argument. Because the legal landscape in Texas has been slanted over the years. The Legislature has its thumb on the scales of justice, and they’ve built up schemes, so many schemes, to stop the average person from even getting a day in court against the Lege’s preferred donors--big business, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and the medical lobby. They’ve built mechanisms into the law that are designed to stop valid claims from ever seeing the light of day in a courtroom; from ever being heard by a jury; from ever getting a chance at justice. And a lot of those mechanisms involved allowing defendants to drag out cases with appeals that trial-court lawyers just weren’t equipped or experienced to handle. You see, appellate lawyers have long been something that only the rich defendants or the highest-value cases can afford, but the plaintiffs working on a shoestring need them just as much, maybe more. Texas is a tough place to be a plaintiff, and leveling the table is hard. But it’s what I try to do. And that’s my story. I try to be a difference-maker. An equalizer. The one who puts the little guy on the same footing as the big business. It doesn’t mean I win most of the time; it means the opposite, quite honestly. But I won’t stop fighting. For my clients. For justice. For you.
