Author: kevin@kevincullen.me

By Mark Curriden (Jan. 25) – Rod Phelan remembers his early days practicing law. “My billable rate was $35 an hour and I made $1,200 a month,” he says. “I brought my lunch to work just about everyday to save money.” Carrington Coleman hired Phelan when he graduated from Duke Law School in 1973. He…

By Mark Curriden (March 17) – Bill Dorsaneo garnered the name “Wild Bill” during his four decades of teaching civil litigation, but his first big case was in 1962. He was arguing before the city council at Valley Forge, Penn., that a proposed curfew on young people was “unconstitutional and unfair.” Dorsaneo was only 17…

By Mark Curriden Exis Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund, was facing trial in 2011 after being sued by Fairfax Financial for allegedly shorting the stock of a Canadian insurance company and spreading a false negative tip about the firm. The case, charging racketeering, commercial disparagement and tortious interferences, clearly wasn’t going well. Facing…

By Mark Curriden (Jan. 12) – Lawyers in small towns and rural areas are usually generalists. They have to know multiple kinds of law. They defend drug dealers one day and sue businesses for products liability or slip-and-fall cases the next. They operate in criminal court in the morning and bankruptcy court that same afternoon.…

By Mark Curriden Jan. 9, 2017 – Don Godwin was on his way to watch the Kentucky Derby in May 2010 when the general counsel of Halliburton called. Just days earlier, the BP Deepwater Horizon had exploded, killing 11 people, injuring 17 others and pouring an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico…

By Mark Curriden In 1998, Korean conglomerate Hyundai Electronics hired Longview lawyer T. John Ward, a three-decade-long veteran trial lawyer, to defend it against allegations of patent infringement brought by Texas Instruments. A partner at Brown McCarroll & Oaks Hartline, Ward specialized in products liability law and malpractice litigation. Intellectual property law was as foreign…

By Mark Curriden Long before Steve Susman, David Beck, Mike McKool and Mike Lynn left big law firms to start their own litigation boutiques, there was Robin Gibbs. In 1974, Gibbs was a third year associate at Vinson & Elkins in Houston. He was in court every week defending insurance companies in civil lawsuits before…

By Natalie Posgate  (Jan. 31) – Legendary tax lawyer and Hughes & Luce co-founder Vester T. Hughes, Jr. passed away in late January. He was 88 years old. A Lion of the Texas Bar, Hughes was known for a multitude of achievements, including his work on re-writing the tax code for federal estate and gift…

By Mark Curriden (Dec. 1) – The star witness for the Texas Beef Group told jurors in Amarillo that Oprah Winfrey had stacked the deck in a 1995 episode that was critical of beef safety measures. The show, the epidemiologist testified, was nothing short of a “lynch mob.” Then Chip Babcock stepped to the lectern…

By Janet Elliott (Dec. 3) – The January 1967 launch pad fire that claimed the lives of three Apollo astronauts was America’s first space program disaster. That same year a young attorney named Ronald Krist opened a law office in Clear Lake not far from NASA headquarters. Several years had passed when Betty Grissom, the…