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Plaintiffs Attorney John M. O'Quinn Remembered as Being 'Bigger Than Life'
Texas Lawyer
October 30, 2009
John O'Quinn
Image: John Everett
While standing in the security line at Houston's William P. Hobby Airport to catch an early flight on Thursday, former state district Judge Levi Benton extended his hand and warmly greeted one of Texas' greatest trial lawyers, John M. O'Quinn.
Benton could not have known it would be the last time he would see him. O'Quinn, 68, of Houston's The O'Quinn Law Firm, died in a car accident later that morning. "I started to say, 'John, why are you flying Southwest? Where's your plane? Why are you going through the security like the rest of us guys?' says Benton, now a partner in the Houston office of Strasburger & Price who was on his way to Dallas for a partner meeting.
Instead, Benton says he and O'Quinn talked about their common friend, South Texas College of Law Associate Dean Gerald Treece, and made plans to have lunch soon. "He was going to a mediation in San Antonio. I don't know who the mediation was for or whom it was with,' Benton says of O'Quinn, who was traveling alone.
Later, Benton says he started receiving messages on his cell phone from his law partners saying that O'Quinn had died in an automobile accident in Houston. Benton couldn't believe it: "I said the media is wrong.' He learned later that reports that O'Quinn and another man had been killed when the SUV they were in hit a tree on the Allen Parkway in Houston were true.
"He either changed his mind or missed his flight ...' Benton says of O'Quinn. "I'm just stunned and saddened. I wish he'd gotten on that plane.'
Police say O'Quinn was driving the Chevrolet Suburban that crossed over the median, went across the eastbound lanes of traffic around 8 a.m. and crashed into a tree on the other side of the road.
O'Quinn and his passenger were both pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, Houston Police Department spokeswoman Jodi K. Silva says. Neither was wearing a seatbelt, she says, and witnesses told police the SUV was traveling between 50 and 60 miles per hour on slightly slick road conditions. The Harris County Medical Examiner's Office confirms the identity of the passenger as 56-year-old Johnny Cutliff.
'BIGGER THAN LIFE '
News of O'Quinn's death spread quickly through Texas' legal community.
"We lost a good friend and a hell of a lawyer. John had his ups and his downs, but he represented a lot of folks that needed help, and they couldn't get a better job than he would do. It's a shame,' says Walter Umphrey, a partner in Beaumont's Provost H Umphrey. He famously partnered with O'Quinn and three other lawyers in 1996 to represent the state of Texas against the tobacco industry in a case that resulted in a $17 billion settlement.
"Just his name on the pleadings and his presence was valuable in evaluation of trial and settlement,' Umphrey says of O'Quinn.
O'Quinn's longtime partner, Richard Laminack, says O'Quinn was a lot like Houston, "the city that created him.' The pair's partnership ended in 2006.
"He was bigger than life, widely successful, full of faults, thought there was nothing he couldn't do [and] believed in himself. He was big,' says Laminack, now a partner in Laminack, Pirtle & Martines in Houston.
Joe Jamail, another famous Texas trial lawyer, never tried a suit with O'Quinn but handled a suit in which O'Quinn was a defendant. Jamail and Houston plaintiffs lawyer Ronald Krist represented Kendall Montgomery, one of O'Quinn's former associates, in a fee dispute that settled on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America.
"There are a lot of rumors about a feud between John and I. There was never a feud between John and I. I never considered him a competitor or an enemy. The only person I consider a competitor is the lawyer I'm trying a case against,' says Jamail of Houston's Jamail & Kolius. "Talk about a feud -- he insisted that I have a picture made with him that was in your newspaper. He had that hanging in his office wall for awhile.'
Montgomery sued O'Quinn seeking unpaid fees and punitive damages, but the litigation settled a week after lawyers picked a jury in Montgomery v. O'Quinn. In that suit, Montgomery, who worked for O'Quinn from 1991 to 1999, alleged O'Quinn owed him at least $105 million in fees, based on a 25 percent share of the firm's net fees from several large suits including the $17 billion settlement in the Texas tobacco litigation.
Dale Jefferson, a Houston lawyer who has represented O'Quinn in litigation, says the Texas legal community has lost a legend.
"I feel so bad for all of his co-workers and employees and their family who have depended on this great man for their life and their livelihood, and it's gone in a flash. No warning. It's gone,' says Jefferson, a partner in Martin, Disiere, Jefferson & Wisdom.
In addition to being a successful trial lawyer, O'Quinn was a noteworthy philanthropist.
Nancy Rapoport, former dean of the University of Houston Law Center where O'Quinn graduated from law school, says he was a big financial benefactor of the school, especially after it was flooded by 14 feet of water during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.
"He was amazingly generous to the University of Houston and the University of Houston Law Center,' says Rapoport, now a professor at the University of Nevada William S. Boyd School of Law.
"He was also both publicly and privately very generous to a number of Houston charities, some of which you'll never see his name on because he was very careful about keeping his name away from certain charities because they had to be done quietly and privately.'
Renu Khator, chancellor and president of the University of Houston, says in a written statement that O'Quinn was one of the university's most generous financial contributors.
"The O'Quinn Law Library and O'Quinn Field at Robertson Stadium are the most prominent examples of his philanthropy at UH but are by no means the extent of it. Over the years, he made numerous gifts, including significant donations to the UH Library and to the Cougar Marching Band. A good deal of this school's success can be credited to John's unflagging commitment to making UH a better institution,' she writes.
EARLY YEARS
O'Quinn originally wanted to be an engineer. Graduating from Houston's Lamar High School, teachers urged him to pursue engineering, and he was accepted at Rice University. After two years, he knew it wasn't for him. So O'Quinn was sent to a career counselor who tested him and talked with him for a while. "He said, 'You should be a lawyer. You should be a trial lawyer. You'd be great at it,'" O'Quinn recalled in an interview in 2000 when Texas Lawyer included him in a special magazine titled Legal Legends. And the counselor was right: O'Quinn graduated from the University of Houston Law Center in 1967 at the top of his class.
School officials pushed O'Quinn to accept a job with Baker Botts because no graduates from UH had been hired there before. O'Quinn worked at the firm from 1967 to 1969, where he said he received great training. There, O'Quinn worked with partner Jim Kronzer, and O'Quinn joined Kronzer, Abraham, Watkins & Steely, which Kronzer formed after he left Baker Botts.
O'Quinn hit his first million-dollar judgment in the early 1970s. Soon after, he and four other lawyers formed Riddle, Murphrey, O'Quinn & Cannon. The firm was listed by Forbes magazine at one point as one of the top 15 grossing firms in the country. O'Quinn went out on his own in 1981, at first as John M. O'Quinn & Associates and later as O'Quinn & Laminack.
O'Quinn won a 1984 verdict of $105 million for the family of a chemical plant worker who died of leukemia after work exposure to benzene, a 1992 verdict of $25 million in a silicone breast implant case, a 1993 verdict of $400 million for businessmen who said they were cheated, and a 1994 verdict of $40 million in another implant case. By 2000, O'Quinn had won more than 250 cases with verdicts of at least $1 million, and he told Texas Lawyer that year that his verdicts and settlements over the preceding decade exceeded $20 billion.
In the benzene case, U.S. District Judge Hugh Gibson accused O'Quinn of hypnotizing the jury and required him, during a retrial, to stay at least 12 feet away from the jury at all times.
"What I try to do is humanize the case,' O'Quinn said in 2000 in explaining his style. With each case, he wanted the jury to care about the plaintiff and what the plaintiff had lost. "Until you can get the case to that level, it's not going to happen, the really big verdict's not going to happen."
O'Quinn continued his courtroom success. Significantly, in 2004, he won a $1 billion verdict in a fen-phen suit in Beaumont.
But O'Quinn had his own legal troubles over the years, facing State Bar of Texas disciplinary suits and fee disputes filed by lawyers who formerly worked with him, such as the suit filed by Montgomery.
O'Quinn fended off two State Bar of Texas disciplinary proceedings.
In 1989, the Bar and O'Quinn settled a disciplinary suit when O'Quinn accepted a public reprimand and performed community service. The Bar had accused him of hiring eight runners to solicit more than 100 clients, allegations O'Quinn denied.
Then, in 1998, O'Quinn and two other plaintiffs lawyers were exonerated in a Bar disciplinary suit that alleged they solicited clients after a 1994 plane crash in South Carolina, allegations the three lawyers denied.
While he made a reputation by winning breast-implant verdicts, O'Quinn at the time of his death was appealing a 2007 arbitration award that ordered his firm to pay a total of $41.5 million in damages to the class in Martha Wood, et al. v. John M. O'Quinn, P.C., John M. O'Quinn & Associates, and O'Quinn & Laminack, after finding his firm had breached a fiduciary duty to a group of former breast-implant clients. The clients allege they were overcharged for expenses.
Sadly, the man who spent some of his wealth collecting cars died on the road. O'Quinn had amassed a collection of more than 600 cars and had plans to open an automobile museum in Houston. In 2005, he spent $690,000 to buy a 1975 Ford Escort once owned by the late Pope John Paul II.
