But a thick fog covered Interstate 10 that morning, and the Leggios were soon part of a hundred-car pileup. For one brief moment, Jamail seemed like an 88-year-old man. On direct examination, Foreman testified that he had not experienced any neck problems before the accident, and that he was entitled to $75,000 for lost income due to the injury. In jury selection I addressed his condition head-on. “So, there’s always going to be a need for good lawyers.”, Jamail pauses to clarify. 1985—Won a $10.5 billion jury verdict for Pennzoil in a suit against Texaco for interfering with a merger with Getty Oil. He absolutely loves the fight, delights in getting as deep in an opponent’s head as he can. During a break, I heard Jamail tell him, “Call your people and get me $9 million so we can fucking get home by Christmas!” Soon enough, Barger presented an acceptable offer. The Houston attorney, renowned as one of the state’s most aggressive litigators, generous philanthropists, ready Scotch drinkers, and artful deployers of the word “motherfucker”—and quite possibly the greatest trial lawyer in American history—was born in 1925. “At the end she had a trache in and couldn’t talk. Joe Jamail should not have as much going on as he does. His $10.5 billion verdict in Pennzoil v. Texaco in 1985—still the largest jury award in history—was merely the most famous. Jamail scored 76. At the end of trial Thursday, Ferguson got in a shouting match with a young attorney on the defense team who stood up in the gallery and accused him of misstating the record. Share with your friends. He reduced his office space from 12,000 square feet to a more manageable 6,000. The implication was that C. R. England didn’t care about anything but saving its skin. The move to replace jury trials with mediation and arbitration, he says, is actually an effort by elitists in our society to control how disputes are decided. Navigating website ADA compliance: 'If you have videos that are not captioned, you’re a sitting duck', The death of a lawyer: A journey from law school to retirement, Interested in infectious disease litigation? Now the rows of floor-to-ceiling shelf space in the large, windowless room were occupied by items celebrating Jamail. Berg likes to say that the trial lawyer who will become a master of the art of trying cases, is the lawyer who asks, "How can I get better?" “They’ve invented this new term, litigator. They stood up hurriedly and nodded when Jamail called their names, both with slight grimaces. “By not trying the small cases, the lawyers don’t get the courtroom experience,” he says. 637 A.2d 34 (Del. Then, finally, he changed the name by the door to read simply “Joe Jamail, Lawyer.”. By then Lee was in Houston raising their boys, and Jamail started trying as many cases as he could, sometimes up to thirty a year. The facts were bad. He still lives in that house, a Mediterranean-style mansion hidden behind a giant hedge in River Oaks. He has... A $100 WAGER. He had groundwork to lay. “Then Walter and I took them for $16.6 million!”. Or so says Joe Jamail. On a $100 bet from a classmate, he took the bar exam in 1952, a year before he graduated. The result: On Nov. 20, 1985, a Texas jury returned a $10.53 billion verdict for Jamail’s client, Pennzoil Co., against Texaco Inc. When jury selection finally got under way, he gave them hope. Jamail says he never figured out why the extra $4. We’ve got plenty of money.’ ” To date he’s donated $256 million to schools, museums, hospitals, and parks all over the state. In 1985, Jamail represented Pennzoil, whose CEO Hugh Liedtke was Jamail's close friend, in a lawsuit against Texaco. '53, B.A. I’ll let Walter tell you the rest.”, “Joe asked if they’d give us that in writing,” said Umphrey. He was soon hired as a prosecutor. It was moving slowly, but the jury seemed to have fallen in solidly behind the Leggios. “That’s where the painting came from. Subscribe or link your existing subscription. That taught me that if you knock down the biggest bully, the rest will scatter.”, He says he was a “shitty kid,” wayward, interested only in fighting, goofing with shoppers in his dad’s store, and, once he got older, drinking beer and chasing girls. A page later, the expert opined that Jamail might be a poor lawyer. Jamail realized he didn’t need to vilify him and that doing so would be a mistake, particularly in front of a jury that was half African American and heavily working class. “He went straight down. He then enrolled at UT but barely lasted a month. Note Many years earlier, Nelson had persuaded Jamail to loosen up the night before closing arguments in the Pennzoil v. Texaco lawsuit with a night of drinking. I’m a trial lawyer. Barger was the salesman, with windblown gray hair and a bright-white toothpaste-ad smile. He won Pennzoil in 1985. We took it and ended up spending it all at the bar that night drinking.”. And there’s always a chance one of those jurors might find him- or herself in a tough spot and need a good lawyer. “That uncertainty breeds anxiety, which breeds mistakes, which breeds settlements.”. Jamail garnered headlines again in 1976 when he was representing Major League Baseball player Bob Aspro­monte. “The manager asked me what was going to happen, and I said that their competitor, Montgomery Ward, was about to have the biggest damn Memorial Day sale in history.”. As cynical as it sounds, their parents’ sudden deaths meant there were no medical bills or pain and suffering damages. Sorry, we’re unable to find an account with that username and password. Thompson resisted the bait, but Jamail pressed. “We used the $100 to buy a lot of beer and got drunk by the lake.”, Jamail remembers his first five trials. “I had about twenty clients,” Jamail said, “and the bill ran up pretty damn high. See infra Part V. 6. When Joe Jamail won an $11.2 billion jury verdict against Texaco for his client, Pennzoil, in 1985, the plaintiffs lawyer from Houston officially became larger than life. “Tell me what ‘preventable’ means.”, “If your company wrote that in a report to your next employer, they were saying it was your fault, correct?”, In Houston, Jamail works at a long, uncluttered conference table in a sparsely furnished corner office roughly the size of a convenience store. “He drove into Bettie Sue Cream’s front yard. Instead he called the driver, Richardo Kerr, and took a more measured approach. She was a sculptress who specialized in cement chickens. A petite brunette, she was a friend of his sister’s, only seventeen but about to earn an education degree from Incarnate Word, in San Antonio. “The jury looked at me, expecting me to give them an answer,” says Jamail. He turned to head to his office but stopped and pointed to a pin-striped gray suit hanging on the back wall. The Ballad of Boots and Stumpy, the Bad Boys of the Birding Center. Then he downplayed Kerr’s driving record in his own opening that afternoon. Joe Jamail is best known for winning a $10.53 billion jury verdict in 1987 on behalf of But you came every day, you listened carefully to the evidence, and you made the difference. He called Abe into his office and handed him the write-up. The case later settled for $3.3 billion. In a television debate over tort reform with a physician, the medical doctor was slamming lawyers as a... BUCKING POPULAR OPINION. Enter your email below to send a password reset email. So I said, ‘That’s nothing compared to this guy. In legal cases, cautious lawyers on the other side of a case from these men are more likely to settle and settle big. I don’t know what the fuck they did with it.”. Joe Jamail was known to give meaningful advice to individuals interested in pursuing a career in the legal system: According to Jamail, UT wanted it but TSU needed it. Eventually she relented. And everybody charged with marijuana possession was black. He asked if any had been in it. He was serious but not stern. “None of us knew what the hell we were doing,” says Jamail. “So when the huge, bet-the-company cases come along, there are only a handful of trial lawyers who can handle it. She sent a report down to Darrell [Royal], who was athletics director. After Judge Floyd recessed and left the courtroom, the attorney stepped forward. Joe Jamail Net Worth. It was Thursday. “I can’t describe the feeling I got the first time I won a jury award for an injured person,” he says. Jamail moved on to the accident, keying in on a text message C. R. England sent its drivers that morning, warning of bad weather around Beaumont. “It was a cop with a leg injury. And the parents were in their sixties. “I thought she meant a million dollars. I bought that photo for a buck.”. Jamail got in his face. There was a big Texaco star on top of it when I moved in here, but it’s not there now.” He starts laughing again. “But they weren’t having any part of it. Jamail called his first witness once Edwards finished. Forbes magazine estimates Jamail is worth $1.5 billion, making him the 321st-richest person in the U.S. Figure out what yours is and stick to … But here’s my question: Can you still award him money if I prove that had nothing to do with this wreck?’ The ones who said no were disqualified. Did you keep count of how many times he said that?”, “About a dozen,” said Jamail. Had mosquitoes as big as goddamn bluebirds. I try cases. Jamail’s buddies—singer Willie Nelson and former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal—were in a white limo, begging him to go out for a drink or two. I want that goddamn Chicago pimp suit you wear.’ So he gave it to me.”. He got on a roll that has yet to end. “Talk like you’re sitting in your living room,” says Jamail. They were headed for a Biloxi casino to celebrate their forty-second wedding anniversary, even though it meant spending Thanksgiving without their three kids for the first time. Joe Jamail won the case and was ultimately made famous for collecting a $335 million contingency fee. “It was hard in those days. So he forged his father’s name on enlistment documents and joined the Marines. “There’s the Shell building,” he says. Mr. Jamail's longtime friendship with the original trial judge, Anthony J. P. Farris, became an issue in the preliminary stages of the case. But shit, by then the interest made up for it. He remembers one in particular.
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