[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_4″ last=”no” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ class=”” id=””][fusion_imageframe lightbox=”no” lightbox_image=”” style_type=”none” hover_type=”none” bordercolor=”” bordersize=”0px” borderradius=”0″ stylecolor=”” align=”none” link=”” linktarget=”_self” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ hide_on_mobile=”no” class=”” id=””] 
[/fusion_imageframe][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ last=”yes” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ class=”” id=””][fusion_text]By Mark Curriden
HOUSTON (Oct. 19) – Two years ago, Stanford University asked Houston trial lawyer Joe Jamail to lecture a large group of students and alumni of its business school.
As he preached on the sad decline in the number of jury trials in the U.S. as a result of tort reform, a hand raised near the back of the auditorium.
“Don’t you think there are too many lawyers in America today?”
Jamail pounced.
“If you are talking about lawyers who are paper pushers, you are damn right there are,” he said. “But as long as there are bastard executives like you people who are stealing from each other and screwing each other over, you need more lawyers like me.”
After the lecture, executives from Apple introduced themselves and hired him on the spot to handle a contentious business dispute.
Joseph D. Jamail Jr. celebrates his 90th birthday today. He is arguably the most famous and successful trial lawyer in history. He has tried more than 500 jury and bench trials, which resulted in more than $13 billion in judgments for his clients — not too shabby for a guy who failed torts in law school.
Jamail initially enrolled at the University of Texas in 1942 as a pre-med student, but received five F’s when he failed to show up for his final exams. He forged his father’s name on enlistment documents and joined the Marines.
Jamail returned home after the war and returned to UT to get his liberal arts degree and then law degree.
When a classmate bet him $100 that he couldn’t pass the bar exam during his second year of law school in 1952, he accepted the challenge and scored 76. The passing grade was 75.
“Shit, I’m overeducated,” he told his friends. “We used the $100 to buy a lot of beer and got drunk by the lake.”
Jamail’s first courtroom victory came while he was still in law school. A waitress at one of his favorite bars had cut her hand trying to open a bottle of beer. So Jamail and his classmates sued the beer’s bottling company.
“None of us knew what the hell we were doing,” says Jamail. “The thing was, the other side and the judge also knew we didn’t know what we were doing. Fortunately, the beer company offered us $750 to settle the case. We took it and ended up spending it all at the bar that night drinking.”
Jamail’s first brush with notoriety came in a case other lawyers rejected.
His client had three shots of bourbon before driving to get his family takeout fried chicken for dinner. On the way to the fast food restaurant, his car jumped the curb of the cement island in the middle of the street and crashed into a tree.
At the hospital, the driver’s blood-alcohol level tested at .22. He died a couple days later. The man’s widow asked the city to pay the funeral cost, but city officials just laughed at her.
Jamail says he agreed to take the case and drove to the spot where the accident occurred.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says. “There was a tree growing in the middle of the damn street – a couple of them, in fact. I thought, what the hell is a tree doing growing in the middle of the street. A street sign, I could understand, but not a damn tree.”
Thinking creatively, Jamail sued the city of Houston claiming that the trees were a public nuisance. He won at trial, of course, and the city paid for the man’s funeral, plus $6,000 for pain and suffering. Plus the city had to cut down the trees.
“I got calls for the next two years from these tree-huggers cursing me for having the trees cut down,” he says.
No articles about Joe Jamail are complete without mentioning November 1985. He had been in court for several weeks trying a complex business dispute and had just sat down at his work desk at home to map out thoughts for closing arguments, which were scheduled for 9 a.m. the next morning.
“All of a sudden, I hear a car horn blowing outside my house,” he says.
A white limousine pulled into Jamail’s driveway and out jumped two of his best friends, singer Willie Nelson and former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal.
“They started begging me to go out drinking with them and I tried telling them that this was the biggest damn case of my life and that I needed to prepare,” he says. “But they weren’t having any part of it. They kept me up all fucking night drinking. I could barely see straight the next morning.”
The record will show that Jamail did well. He told jurors that while the case seemed highly complicated, it was actually quite simple.
“This case is about people keeping their word and being honest,” he told jurors. “My client honored their word. The other side did not.”
The jury agreed, awarding Jamail’s client, Pennzoil Co., $10.53 billion against Texaco Inc. The case eventually settled for $3.3 billion. Jamail’s personal take topped $400 million.
“We celebrated that night at my house by eating hamburgers and drinking beer,” he says. “I’ve still got the $3 billion deposit slip on my wall.”[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]