Loading ...Joe Jamail, Flamboyant Texas Lawyer Who Won Billions for Clients, Dies at 90 - NYTimes.com
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
The New York Times
Joe Jamail, a celebrated Texas lawyer who had flunked civil negligence in law school and barely passed the bar exam but went on to dazzle his profession by winning gargantuan judgments — including Pennzoil’s $10.5 billion award against Texaco in 1985, then the largest in history — died on Wednesday in Houston. He was 90.
The University of Texas, where he was a major benefactor, confirmed his death on its website.
Mr. Jamail’s specialty was personal injury cases — people hurt in accidents or by commercial products — and over five decades he won more than 500 lawsuits and $13 billion in judgments and settlements for his clients. The defendants were mostly insurance companies and, in cases of product liability, corporations like Firestone Tire & Rubber, General Motors, Eli Lilly, RCA and Remington Arms.
Audacious, unpredictable, a theatrical courtroom rogue, Mr. Jamail won the hearts and minds of juries with down-home straight talk in a barroom drawl that turned boring contracts and soporific legal jargon into simple, dramatic morality plays, with casts of victims (his clients) and villains (the other guys).
“People who want to be derogatory call it ‘whoopin’ and ‘hollerin,’ but Joe just has great rapport with juries,” said G. Irvin Terrell, a lawyer who was Pennzoil’s regular outside counsel and worked with Mr. Jamail on the Texaco case. The judgment they won was five times as great as any previous award.
The case, in which Pennzoil accused Texaco of improperly interfering with its 1984 deal to buy part of Getty Oil, was Mr. Jamail’s first on behalf of a major corporate client, and it elevated him overnight from the lone star of Texas courtrooms to near-mythical status in American jurisprudence. But if the size of the judgment, from Pennzoil’s point of view, seemed too good to be true, it indeed was.
The judgment withstood appeals, unlike many large awards, but Pennzoil received only a fraction. Texaco, whose net worth was roughly equal to the judgment, was virtually wiped out. Unable even to post a bond to cover the award during appeals, Texaco filed for bankruptcy and settled the case for $3 billion in 1987. Mr. Jamail’s fee was said to be $345 million.
Long known as the King of Torts, Mr. Jamail worked on a contingency fee basis, usually one-third of the award, and earned $10 million to $25 million a year in the decade before the Pennzoil case. In 1994 alone, he earned $90 million (about $145 million in today’s money), according to Forbes magazine, and he had amassed $1.5 billion by 2009, when Forbes ranked him 236th on its list of richest Americans.
Joseph Dahr Jamail Jr. was born on Oct. 19, 1925, to Joseph and Marie Anton Jamail. His father was a Lebanese immigrant who arrived in Houston as a boy, sold food from a cart in a farmers’ market and eventually built a chain of 28 grocery stores. The younger Joseph graduated from St. Thomas High School in Houston and attended the University of Texas at Austin for a semester before joining the Marines in 1943.
After serving in the Pacific in World War II, he returned to the university, earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and married the former Lillie Mae Hage, known as Lee. She died in 2007. The couple had three sons, Joseph Dahr III, Randall Hage and Robert Lee, who survive him. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Jamail lived in Houston.
In law school at the university, Mr. Jamail flunked his first course on torts, the field in which he would excel. Classmates recalled him as a gregarious, storytelling saloon companion and a brilliant but indifferent student. Months before receiving his law degree in 1953, he took the Texas bar exam on a $100 bet, cramming over a weekend and scoring 76, one point over the passing grade.
“I overtrained,” he said.
His first job was at Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman, Bates & Jaworski, a politically connected white-shoe law firm in Houston, whose best-known partner, Leon Jaworski, was later the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.
“I lasted about 20 minutes in that kind of corporate law-by-committee environment,” Mr. Jamail recalled.
He worked for a year as an assistant prosecutor in Harris County, Tex., then went into private practice. His first big splash in the papers came in what was called the Case of the Killer Tree.
In an act of hubris, he represented the widow of a drunken driver fatally injured when his car jumped a curb and hit a tree. He persuaded a jury that the tree, on a traffic island in the middle of a street, had been planted in the wrong place by the city. His client won funeral expenses and $6,000 for suffering, and the city cut down the tree.
An outstanding court performer, he would arrive without a briefcase or stacks of documents, the days of preparation memorized to preserve an illusion of simplicity.
He was a husky man with blue eyes and a potato nose, fleshy lips and a dimpled chin. The gray hair was parted vaguely on the left, and the face was florid and a bit shiny, as if he had been out all night; friends, who included Kirk Douglas, Willie Nelson and Darrell Royal, the Hall of Fame Longhorn football coach, said he often had been.
But he examined witnesses and nurtured juries with an actor’s repertoire that could be confiding, angry, cajoling, blustering — pitying the victims and indignant at the villains. It worked again and again: for the girl paralyzed in the crash of an all-terrain vehicle, for the man whose hands were burned off by an electrical box, for the baseball player blinded in one eye by a battery jumper cable.
Mr. Jamail and his wife gave millions to the University of Texas, the Texas Heart Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and other philanthropies.
His name is a fixture on the University of Texas campus in Austin, where a swim center, the football field, a law school pavilion and a legal library and research center have been named for him. His likeness can be found there as well: a statue at the law school and another at the football field, making him the only person with two on the university’s 350-acre campus — an honor that rankled some students and faculty members as excessive when the second one was unveiled in 2004.
Mr. Jamail lectured at colleges and universities, and was the recipient of numerous awards. His autobiography, “Lawyer: My Trials and Jubilations,” written with Mickey Herskowitz, was published in 2003.
His office in Houston had many mementos, including a glass paperweight encasing the bank-deposit slip for the $3 billion that Pennzoil had collected from Texaco.
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