Competitive spirit aside, there are few attorneys in this country who relish facing David Beck ’61 across the table. He’s been called the “go-to lawyer for lawyers in trouble.”
Some of the biggest clients often choose some of the smallest firms, and those “boutique” firms can zero in on the attack – or defense, as the case may be – and focus with laserlike efficiency on favorable verdicts. David Beck has created just such a niche for his Houston firm, Beck, Redden & Secrest L.L.P. His reputation as a top litigator answers the question: When you can afford to hire anyone, whom do you hire? The
biggest hire Beck.
His Dad worked at Gulf refinery in Port Arthur while his mother worked at home to raise five children. Money was tight, and a degree was most accessible by attending Lamar. Today, David Beck owns one of the most elite law firms in the country – American Lawyer magazine has named it one of the top five “boutique” firms in the United States.
That’s serious accomplishment, and it speaks highly of an innate entrepreneurial spirit.
A little of that spirit and something else he can’t identify sparked an early desire to be a courtroom lawyer.
“That’s just something I knew from an early age, and, when I went to Lamar, I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” he said. He joined the pre-law program via a bachelor’s in government, the registration-day suggestion of Irving Dawson, then chair of the government department.
“He was the first person I met when I showed up at Lamar to register. I didn’t have a clue what to major in. He looked at my test scores and said, ‘You know, you really ought to look into government and history.’ It was a good choice, but I wonder what would’ve happened if the head of the
engineering department would have said that. Professor Dawson was a wonderful mentor. He knew my economic background and helped me get part-time jobs to make some money and stay in school. So he was a tremendous influence on me.”
Beck sets objectives and attains them. He graduated from high school on a Friday and began college classes the next Monday. He became an associate, then partner, then senior partner at Fulbright & Jaworski. Complacency is not in his vocabulary. At the point most people are winding down toward retirement, he was gearing up, starting his own law firm in 1992 with Joe Redden Jr. and Ronald Secrest. “It just seemed like I needed another, as my wife would say, mountain to climb,” he said.
He and his wife, Judy, met in high school and now raise longhorns on their
Blanco ranch. Two of their three children followed in their father’s footsteps. The eldest, Lauren, is a partner with her law firm in Houston and is mother to two boys and a girl. Son David is a lawyer in San Antonio, completing college and law school after a tour during the Gulf War as a marine. Their youngest daughter, Allison, earned an M.B.A. and is in real estate in Houston.
Though he attests to the stellar quality of Fulbright & Jaworski, the large-firm environment forced concessions he became frustrated with making. “It had gotten so big that whenever I would be contacted to be involved in a major matter, I would be disqualified because a lawyer in the firm in Dallas, for example, had written a will for somebody. The other thing was I never was really able to satisfy the entrepreneurial bit that I had.”
He is extraordinarily proud of building the firm to its current position of nationwide respect, achieved in just 13 years. “That took a lot of hard work by a lot of good people,” he said. “It took some of the other firms that were on that list [the Top 5 boutique firms in the country] 30, 40 or 50 years.” The term “boutique” refers to a firm that specializes.
“We don’t do corporate tax work or estate planning,” Beck said. “When they say boutique, they really mean a firm that does nothing but litigation.” And Beck, Redden handles high-stakes litigation for corporate defendants in trouble. For 3M Company Inc., W. Curtis Webb secured three defense verdicts in product liability trials involving dust masks and respirators.
Beck, Redden lawyers “are courageous and unflappable,” says 3M general counsel Thomas Boardman. “They are steely-eyed gunslingers when you have to go to the middle of the street at high noon,” quoted writer Alison Frankel in the The American Lawyer.
The firm is representing Wyeth as lead trial counsel in hundreds of fen-phen trials in Beaumont. Beck was lead counsel in a number of trials in the last two years. Two bear mentioning: the $140 million T-Bar-X win concerning breach of confidentiality and Boren v. Perkins, in which he obtained a defense verdict in Texas state court for a bank president sued for civil fraud.
Beck’s work ethic brought him to the top of his game, and he expects the same in those he hires. The firm normally hires only from the top 10 percent of a law school class. He looks for a subjective mix of strong work ethic, academic credentials and people skills. “You look for that balance. For example, somebody who’s done well academically, has good people skills and earned 80 percent of their way through school, that’s a real plus.”
With 35 lawyers in the firm today, Beck anticipates they’ll be closer to 50 in the next few years. Opening offices in other cities is a distinct possibility. According to The American Lawyer, Beck, Redden attained finalist stature because it “combines cutting-edge technologies, palpable tastes for risk, and an old-fashioned sense of partnership.” Profits match the effort, and clients come knocking with confidence. The firm’s latest cases include defending the American Bureau of Shipping Inc. in federal court in New York and state
court in Texas against $2 billion in claims by Spain stemming from a tanker accident and oil spill off the Spanish coast and defending ExxonMobil in Alabama class-actions alleging underpayment of royalties in an Alabama oil field.
One of his most recent cases ended in irritation for Beck, not because of a loss but because a lot of preparation and an eager confidence to argue before the jury ended in settlement. Beck believes “if you’re a good trial lawyer, you can try anything. So, the more complex a case is to me , the greater the challenge.
“Part of being an experienced trial lawyer is that you develop a sense of what
the jury’s going to do. Trying a lawsuit is very much like a chess game: You have a strategy going in; you try to anticipate the moves of your opposition. If you’re well prepared, most of the time you’re successful. Every now and then, you’re surprised, which means you have to make some adjustments in your strategy.”
Beck likes dealing with people, whether they are jurors, witnesses, judges or other lawyers, and he enjoys being in court. “You’re trying to persuade someone to your point of view, which, in many instances, is very challenging and sometimes very difficult. But, that’s what makes it exciting,” he said.
On his immediate horizon is a year as president-elect of the American College of Trial Lawyers. His presidency of the group – the membership of which is limited to the top 1 percent of trial lawyers in the country on both sides of the docket, whether plaintiff, defendant, civil or criminal – will begin in October 2006. He will work with lawyers and judges throughout the United States and Canada to accomplish a two-fold mission: to try to get the best lawyers to work to improve the system of justice and also to foster higher ethical standards.
Beck is concerned about the predominance of marketing in the legal profession. “But I think it’s an area where lawyers, who are certainly entitled to market and advertise, need to be certain that what they do is well within the structure of our professional guidelines.” In 2003, he authored “The Legal Profession at the Crossroads: Who Will Write the Future Rules Governing the Conduct of Lawyers Representing Public Corporations?” This past year, the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist appointed him to the prestigious Judicial Conference Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure.
For Beck, there is always room for improvement, always another mountain to climb, and as one of the Top 10 trial lawyers in the United States – so named by the National Law Journal – his skill and powers of persuasion will gain him the summit.
