Posted on 02/03/2008 10:48:05 AM PST by Paleo Conservative
SAN ANTONIO — Mikal Watts didn’t have a fighting chance — politics were in his life from the start.
As a toddler, he rode in a stroller as his mother marched in a farm workers’ rights march in Austin. Politics made for dinner table conversation and filled the pages of books in the family library. He attended fundraising barbecues with his parents. Before the age of 18, he knocked on doors registering people to vote.
In the years since, Watts has risen from law-school whiz kid (he received a degree at 21) to nationally known product liability lawyer and political financier who pledged $10 million of his own fortune in his aborted bid to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
He’s most well known for taking on Ford and Firestone in SUV rollover cases that forced much-publicized recalls, though he also has been involved in significant cases involving pharmaceutical and other industries.
He’s well respected among trial lawyers, though he has faced criticism for some of his methods. A federal judge once censured him for failing to tell Ford his client died during litigation.
Most recently, Watts encountered skepticism surrounding the timing of his departure from the Senate race last fall. Watts cited family reasons, but rumor mills and newspapers around the state hypothesized that Watts was hiding a different reason — political and professional ties to Corpus Christi businessman Mauricio Celis, who is charged with impersonating a lawyer.
Watts recently talked openly about the criticism, calling the speculation “armchair lawyering” by political observers, but shrugged it off as a part of life in the public eye. He says he will run for Senate again in 10 years, when his youngest child has graduated from high school.
Watts spoke with a Caller-Times reporter in the Watts Law Firm office in San Antonio, one of five around the state. He was relaxed, wearing no suit coat or tie. He carried two cell phones that rang sporadically. He laughed easily, but just as easily switched back to a look of concentration.
He was interviewed in another lawyer’s glass-front office in the Bank of America tower downtown, explaining he doesn’t have an office of his own — mostly because he didn’t want to kick any of the firm’s other lawyers out after his August 2006 move from Corpus Christi to San Antonio. He’s hardly there anyway.
After earning a reputation with the rollover cases, Watts argues in trials around the country, from Connecticut to Florida, California to Montana. He doesn’t advertise. At least 95 percent of his firm’s cases are referred, he said, and he estimates he rejects 50 cases for every one he takes. His firm employs 29 lawyers, and Watts is mostly involved in key depositions and trials, putting him in the courtroom about 40 weeks of the year.
His prominence as a trial lawyer and success at securing large payouts make him a poster boy for anti-lawsuit groups that refer to their cause as tort reform and depict lawyers as profiteers of others’ misery at undue expense to U.S. industry. Watts reported earnings of $40 million in 18 months on a Senate candidate financial disclosure form. Some clients owed him as much as $25 million.
Watts says his job satisfaction goes beyond money and that his labor has produced reforms in safety regulations. Those reforms, he says, have saved thousands of lives.
His clients, too, feel their impact.
Donna Bailey, a Portland resident paralyzed after a Ford Explorer accident, accepted a settlement in a landmark case against the companies with Watts’ help. She said Watts and her legal team were expensive, but worth it.
“I personally am glad because of the tires getting recalled,” Bailey said. “I think Mikal did a good job.”
Staying focused
Mikal Watts, now 40, was born in Corpus Christi in 1967. His family lived in Portland until he was in the fifth grade. Sandra Watts was then a teacher at Gregory-Portland High School, and father Guy Watts a lawyer.
When the family moved to Corpus Christi, Sandra Watts began attending South Texas College of Law in Houston. She took care of four children and flew to Houston three days a week for school. She graduated first in her class and now is a state district judge in Nueces County.
Watts has joked that he is a lawyer because he doesn’t have a very good curve ball. But the son of two lawyers really had his mind made up as long as he can remember. Sandra Watts recalled he made the decision by fifth or sixth grade. He knew he wanted to practice in Corpus Christi, Sandra Watts said, and he knew it would be for David Perry, another Corpus Christi trial lawyer who achieved prominence at Ford Motor Co.’s expense.
His best friend in middle school (and later college roommate) was Joseph Huerta, son of another local lawyer, Albert Huerta, and the two were debate partners. Young Mikal took debate at King High School, where he also wrote for the school newspaper, played football and basketball and participated in mock trials.
“He was always focused, from the first grade on,” Sandra Watts said. “If there was a challenge to read the most books, he was focused and he’d do it.”
Mikal was accepted to Yale, but his parents divorced that year and couldn’t afford an Ivy League education. Sandra Watts said not attending Yale is likely one of Mikal’s biggest disappointments in life.
Yet he did anything he could to earn scholarships for the University of Texas — $500 here, another $1,000 there, and Mikal paid for nearly his whole education.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how many essays he wrote, how many applications he filled out, how many speeches he gave,” Sandra Watts said.
Mikal took 20 hours a semester, summer courses and placement tests to skip other classes and graduated in two years with high honors. It only took another two to complete a degree from the University of Texas School of Law.
Earning a reputation
Mikal Watts clerked for the Texas Supreme Court chief justice after earning his law degree at age 21. He was heavily recruited after that one-year clerkship, and turned down an offer from a prestigious Dallas firm to work for Perry in Corpus Christi — for about $30,000 less, his mother says.
He was drawn to Perry’s work for those who are normally underrepresented, Sandra Watts said. Perry is known both for winning big and for working out settlements that dedicate portions of the proceeds toward industry reforms or charitable causes. Watts started in September 1990 and was named a partner in Perry & Haas the following winter.
Watts called Perry a father figure in his life — and his firm is where Watts met future wife Tammy, who worked there as a temp while attending college at Texas Christian University. Watts left Perry & Haas in April 1997 to start his own firm in Corpus Christi.
“The day I showed up at Perry’s firm, I wrote down on a sheet of paper three goals by the time I was 30,” Watts said. “One of them was money-related, one of them was having a verdict of more than $1 million by the time I was 30. The other is having my own law firm. The only reason I left David Perry was I was almost 30.”
His career started taking off with automotive litigation including ruptured fuel tank cases and cases against Chrysler minivans, from which children were ejected after side impacts. A South Carolina case in 1997 earned a $262.5 million judgment against Chrysler. He also won an $80 million verdict in a South Texas case in which two people died in a Dodge truck fire.
“Very soon after, I began having more cases than I could ever dream of,” Watts said.
Watts had done a few tire cases, though a major break came when Perry went on sabbatical and referred some cases to him. One Nueces County suit ended in a settlement in which Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone agreed to make public thousands of pages of documents showing what and when the companies knew about possible rollover problems.
Watts estimates he and a partner, Tab Turner from North Little Rock, Ark., tried half the rollover cases in the country. At one time in the early 2000s, Watts had 150 cases pending against Ford and held monthly meetings with Ford and Bridgestone.
He also began winning huge pharmaceutical cases. A local case — a $143 million judgment against the maker of diabetes drug Rezulin — led to a nationwide settlement. He also won hip implant and heart defibrillator cases but lost closely watched trials, including the first in the country regarding cholesterol drug Baycol and one of the first about pain medication Vioxx.
David Prichard, a commercial trial lawyer who represented Ford for six years, including against Watts, said much of his work is against lawyers of Watts’ caliber, and Watts is among the best.
“He’s a handful,” Prichard said. “That’s just sort of putting it in my vernacular.”
However, Prichard said, Watts sometimes uses questionable methods.
“I have seen some tactics that, let’s just say, I would not employ,” Prichard said. “But I’m not a plaintiff’s lawyer. They sort of raised my eyebrows, but maybe that’s just par for the course on the other side of the docket.”
A federal judge censured Watts in 2005 for failing to tell Ford for five months that his client, a quadriplegic after an accident, died during settlement talks, according to records from a U.S. District Court in West Virginia. Ford asked for Watts and his firm to be taken off the case, saying they didn’t disclose the client’s death because injury would fetch a higher settlement. Watts testified that he thought Ford knew of the death because of Ford’s settlement offer of $1.23 million, and the judge did not remove him from the case.
Watts suffered another setback in 2005 when Ford claimed a jury in Crystal City was tainted before delivering a $28 million verdict against the company. The town’s city manager, who was dating a local lawyer who helped sign up the case for him, served on the jury but didn’t disclose her relation to the case. That local lawyer had referred the case to Watts, who later won his argument against a new trial when two jurors recanted their statements that the city manager influenced their decision.
Political life
Watts has been a member of the Nueces County Democratic Party since he returned to Corpus Christi after law school. He formed a political action committee, the Good Government committee, in 2004 and funded it largely through his firm. He supported and worked on strategies for several campaigns, including state Rep. Juan Garcia’s 2006 victory over incumbent Gene Seaman.
Watts dissolved the Good Government committee last spring to avoid confusion with the Good Government League, a long-standing political group in San Antonio. He continues to donate individually and through Watts Law Firm.
His political reach extends far beyond South Texas. Watts ranked No. 8 in donations to state committees and candidates in 2006 with $653,000, double his contributions in 2004, when he ranked No. 18, according to the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice.
The bulk of his contributions, as with many trial lawyers, goes to Democrats, though Watts also has given to Republicans, including Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.
After years of Democratic fundraising and networking, Watts decided to run for U.S. Senate. He formed an exploratory committee in June in an attempt to unseat Cornyn, the Republican senator elected in 2002.
When asked on a Democracy for Texas candidate questionnaire to say something nice about his opponent, Watts said, “He has just completed construction on his retirement home in Austin. We all need to work together to make sure that beginning in January 2009, he is able to enjoy it full time.”
Watts campaigned for five months, raising money and pledging $10 million of his own to the race. He had a staff of 17. Then, in September, he says, he started to doubt his decision. His youngest daughter cried that she never saw him. He prayed with his wife. He nearly bowed out that month, he says.
But what pushed him to actually do it was a trip to Washington, D.C., in early October, Watts said.
“I was pretty specifically aware that running for Senate would take me out of commission for the year, year and a half I was running,” he said. “Myself and my family were ready to make that commitment. I went to Washington in October and really got a firsthand look at how senators live their lives and how little personal time they have. I reached the conclusion I wasn’t sacrificing 16 months with my kids. I was in fact sacrificing the relationship for the duration.”
So Watts made the announcement Oct. 22 that he was leaving the race, a move that surprised even some of his closest friends. He now says he plans to stay involved in politics through fundraising and contributing and to run for Senate again after his youngest graduates from high school in 10 years.
“I don’t think anybody would respect anybody who would rather be a senator than a father,” he said.
Age: 40
Hometown: Corpus Christi (lives in San Antonio)
Family: Wife Tammy, 38; daughters Taylor, 13, and Hailey, 11; and son Brandon, 9
Law degree: University of Texas School of Law
First law job: Clerk for Texas Supreme Court chief justice
Currently: Operates Watts Law Firm
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