Clark, Thomas & Winters of Austin, which was founded in 1938, has reached its end. Meade Bauer, formerly the firm’s president, says all lawyers have left the firm. “There are no lawyers practicing at Clark, Thomas anymore,” Bauer says. Bauer says he opened a solo practice in Austin on April 1. “That’s what I plan to do for now,” Bauer says. He refers questions to former firm president Larry McNeill , who did not return two telephone messages. The firm had 75 lawyers on Jan. 1, but has experienced defections since the beginning of the year. In February, a group left Clark, Thomas to open an Austin office for Minneapolis litigation firm Bowman and Brooke , and a group of 29 left to form a new firm in Austin on March 14, Duggins Wren Mann & Romero. On March 31, a dozen lawyers left Clark, Thomas to join San Francisco-based Gordon & Rees in Austin and Houston.
Plain-Spoken
Amendments to the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, which include plain-language revisions to the “Texas Pattern Jury Charges: Admonitory Instructions” that judges must give prospective and selected jurors, went into effect April 1. The rule changes are written in language jurors are more likely to understand and follow. For example, one revision clarifies that if only 10 members of a jury agree on every answer in a jury charge, only those 10 members can sign the verdict certificate. Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht says he received word from Wayne Schiess — a University of Texas School of Law professor who worked with Hecht and others on the revisions — that the Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language had chosen the new jury instructions to receive its ClearMark Award, which will be presented at an April 28 ceremony in Washington, D.C. Schiess notes that the process to revise the rules began in 2005. “So many people, from Justice Hecht on down, have been involved, and I felt like — and it’s not just me — that everybody deserved recognition. I bet I was the only person who worked on this that knew there was a Center for Plain Language and that they gave awards. That’s because I’m a language person,” says Schiess, who teaches legal writing. The rule changes must have been clear and easy to understand; there were hardly any comments about them during a months’ long public comment period, which ended March 4, Hecht says. “We got very few comments — just a handful, four or five — and none of them that were critical,” he says.
