Some years ago I pulled into a gas station in Houston and spied a tall man pumping gas into a low-slung Mercedes sports car. He wore a elegantly tailored dark suit and had an unmistakable profile: Craggy features, piercing blue eyes and an enormous nose.
“Hi, Joe!” I said, walking over to Joe Jamail Jr. Billionaire and the richest practicing attorney in the country, he was the winner of the largest court victory in U.S. history in 1985 when he convinced a Houston jury to award Pennzoil $10.5 billion in damages over a busted agreement to buy Getty Oil.
When I ran into Jamail that day, Texas Attorney General Dan Morales had just been indicted for fraud over backroom deals surrounding the state’s $15 billion tobacco settlement. Jamail had helped the case along by telling some unsavory tales about the deal several years before, after he wasn’t included among the politically connected plaintiff lawyers Morales cut in on the fees. I asked him what he thought about the indictment.
“Well, Dan,” he said, in a flat Texas drawl, “all I can say is, hogs get slaughtered.”
Jamail had his own brushes with scandal — he was reprimanded once for telling an opposing lawyer in a deposition, “you could gag a maggot off a meat wagon” — but it was typical of him not to get sucked into the tobacco scam. He was smarter than that, as well as a brilliant courtroom tactician. He died today at 90, the Houston Chronicle has reported, and it saddens me to think of the world without him.
Jamail embodied the polyglot culture of Texas and Houston. He spoke with a drawl but was born into one of the influential families of Lebanese immigrants who helped establish the business culture in Houston. He served in the Marines and then graduated from the University of Texas Law school, starting his practice in 1952. He and his wife Lee, who died in 2007, gave more than $200 million to charity including $41 million to the University of Texas.
I had the pleasure of covering him in an epic trial in Galveston by several airlines against American Airlines over American’s ill-fated attempt to simplify air fares by putting them in just a few price buckets. The other airlines sued for antitrust and Jamail was part of a plaintiff team that also included David Boies. The judge had warned everybody involved that he wouldn’t allow in evidence from a 1982 phone call that the president of Braniff Airlines had secretly recorded, in which American’s then-chairman Bob Crandall urged both airlines to raise prices at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
Boies in cross-examination is like an elegant executioner, taking his subjects apart with a scalpel. Jamail was something entirely different — a dirty barroom fighter, with a shiv in his sleeve in case things got out of hand. He had a reputation for dirty tricks in Galveston — there were reports he had unusually close relations with the bailiffs, useful for monitoring what went on in the jury room — and his cross-examination of Crandall was brutal.
Dallas-Fort Worth. 1982. Braniff Airlines. Dallas-Fort Worth. On it went, until Judge Samuel Kent called a halt to the questioning, ordered the jury out of the courtroom, and then lectured Jamail. “Joe, I told you that phone call isn’t coming in and I meant it!” Kent said. “If you persist with this line of questioning, I will hold you in contempt!”
Source: forbes.com
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