[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” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” 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″ animation_offset=”” 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” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_text]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 about 41 miles off the Louisiana coast.
Lawsuits were already being filed against BP, which owned the Macondo well 5,100 feet below the water’s surface on the Outer Continental Shelf. Other defendants were ocean drilling contractor Transocean and Halliburton, which provided the project’s cement around the well.
Thousands of fishermen and shrimp boat operators, hotels and restaurants, banks and real estate companies filed complaints that the oil spill caused them a loss of business. Even teacher pension funds and a handful of Mexican state governments sued.
In addition, the most powerful entity on the face of the planet, the United States federal government, sued the three corporate conglomerates for violations of the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act. Five states – Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas – later joined the lawsuits, claiming the oil spill cost them billions of dollars in lost tax revenues.
The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated nearly all of those cases pending in the federal courts to U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans.
The Houston oil services company faced tens-of-billions of dollars in possible damages and penalties.
“I’ve been involved in some big cases, but the Deepwater Horizon is the largest multi-district litigation ever consolidated into one trial,” says Godwin, who is the founding partner of Dallas-based Godwin Bowman & Martinez. “This case is unprecedented, both in terms of the size of the litigation and the amount of money at stake. The best lawyers in the U.S. were involved.
“The Exxon Valdez lawsuit was huge, but it pales in comparison to the Deepwater Horizon,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody has.”
Godwin and his team spent more than 15,000 hours on the case, taking more than 200 depositions and examining millions of pages of documents.
Not only did the federal government and the other plaintiffs sue Halliburton for damages, BP tried to shift some of its blame toward the Houston oil field services company by claiming the company provided faulty cement.
“My client was attacked from all sides,” Godwin says. “We knew from the start that this would require a massive effort and an aggressive trial strategy.”
Humble Beginnings
Godwin’s road to being among the elite trial lawyers in Texas was far from traditional and completely unexpected – even by him.
His father was a North Carolina farmer who became a Pontiac car salesman. Basketball great Michael Jordan’s father, James Jordan, was a regular customer.
Godwin worked his way through high school stocking shelves at Winn Dixie. He quickly excelled, becoming manager of the produce section and later managing the whole store.
“I actually thought my career job was managing our local Winn-Dixie,” he says. “Law school was nowhere in the plans.”
The food store chain provided Godwin with a work scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and suddenly received another scholarship to get a master’s degree at Memphis State University.
“My new goal at that point was to become an accountant, but the dean of the business school pushed me to go to law school to specialize in tax law,” he says. “At that point in my life, I didn’t even know any lawyers.”
Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law awarded Godwin a scholarship. He graduated in 1973. That year, he joined Lyne, Klein, French & Wombie as an associate handling various client matters involving wills, estates, trusts and taxes.
“Nine months into the job, a partner asked me to help him in a case going to trial,” he says. “I had never been in a courtroom before, but I immediately loved it and knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
Godwin, speaking at a CLE program at SMU in 2016, said his billable hourly rate was about $45 during those early years.
“There was nothing like being in court and in front of jury fighting for your client,” Godwin told the SMU Dedman audience. “I loved it when I was a baby lawyer and I love it four decades later.”
In 1980, Godwin started his own law firm with George Carlton called Godwin & Carlton.
Godwin’s first big courtroom successes came in 1980 when he was hired by Fina Oil & Chemicals, which is now Total Petrochemicals, to sue individuals who stole fuel from its storage for years to fill up their 18-wheeler trucks.
In the first of the cases to go to trial, Godwin popped the defendants for $2 million. Then he sued five more individuals the next year. This time, he won a $4 million jury verdict for Fina.
Big Clients Came Calling
In 1984, Clayton Williams hired Godwin to handle all litigation for his oil and gas company. Gas pipeline company Tenneco Inc. hired Godwin to defend the company against a series of contract enforcement lawsuits valued at hundreds of millions of dollars each.
As the courtroom successes mounted, more A-list clients – Ray Hunt, Ross Perot, Norman Brinker and Jerry Jones – turned to Godwin to be their lawyer when times got tough. Even famed Houston trial lawyer John O’Quinn hired Godwin to represent him in a case after Godwin had kicked his ass in a billion-dollar jury trial.
Halliburton’s decision to hire Godwin to defend the Houston oilfield services company should not have been surprising. The corporation hired Godwin to represented it several times in some major billion-dollar litigation.
Godwin successfully negotiated a $4 billion settlement resolving 382,000 potentially devastating asbestos lawsuits facing Halliburton.
In 2004, the company hired Godwin to defend it in a billion-dollar contract dispute involving an oil field in Kazakhstan.
“Everything that could go against my client did in that trial,” he says. “It seemed just about every day, the judge issued a negative ruling against us. Halliburton was getting horrible press. I woke up every morning of the trial wondering how the judge would hammer us that day.”
The jury deliberated a day and a half before finding that Halliburton had committed no fraud and no breach of fiduciary duty. The case later settled for a small fraction of the amount the plaintiff wanted.
Godwin says the decline in the number of jury trials during the past two decades has been harmful to the legal profession.
“You can go to all the CLE seminars you want, but you can only learn the art of trying a case by actually going to the courthouse and picking a jury,” he says.
As a young lawyer, Godwin says his first law firm would make him and his fellow associates available to clients to help them with smaller legal cases for a significantly reduced fee or no fee at all.
“These were disputes of $20,000 or $40,000 and we got our teeth knocked in a lot, but we got the experience and we learned from it,” he says. “It provided young associates with an opportunity to try cases every month. We were always at the courthouse and we had no choice but to get to know each other.”
Godwin says law firms pay younger lawyers too much today to let them work for free, but he says the vanishing jury trial is having a negative impact on the legal profession.
“How are our younger lawyers going to try 20 or 30 cases that they need to get board certified (as a trial lawyer) if there are no trials?” he asks.
Monumental Victory
In the Deepwater Horizon case, Godwin scored a major legal victory even before the trial started. He convinced Judge Barbier to rule that Halliburton’s contract with BP required BP to pay all compensatory damages, which included money to victims for losses. Halliburton would have to pay money only if Judge Barbier ruled that the company acted with gross negligence or wanton reckless behavior.
After several months of trial and testimony from scores of witnesses, Judge Barbier announced his decision in September 2014. The judge wrote that “BP’s conduct was reckless” while Halliburton’s conduct was merely negligent. The judge declared that Halliburton’s comparative fault as a percentage of total liability was only three percent, compared to BP’s 67 percent and Transocean’s 30 percent.
“I’m extremely proud of the work we did in this case,” Godwin says. “Our client faced $10 billion or more in damages but walked away with no liability.”
He says he has no plans for retirement, as he continues to enjoy his work.
“I love practicing law and being a lawyer,” Godwin says. “I’ve had to retool my practice a few times and, because of changes in technology and client demands, we may have to continue making changes. The law business is a lot more competitive and that means we need to work harder and think smarter.
“For a kid who dreamed of running a grocery store, it has been an amazing ride,” he says.
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