The local legal market in Fort Worth, Dallas and the surrounding cities is very saturated with lawyers. Anybody looking to hire a lawyer needs to be careful and needs to do the research on the lawyer. And that’s not a knock on any particular lawyer. In any big market, it’s going to be saturated with attorneys. That’s good and bad. The bad thing is you get lots of bad attorneys out there who don’t know what they’re doing, and frankly, they just need the business and they’re not looking to help the client and do what’s best for them. That’s one thing.
If you look at the justice system in Texas, Â it’s changing dramatically. There have been lots of laws passed in regards to tort reform, and that that has changed the legal scene in Texas over the last few years. (although maybe not as dramatically as some people think.)
Obviously, Texas is a very conservative state, and that translates over to juries. You’re dealing with (in a lot of cases) conservative juries, and you have to take that into account when you go to trial, anticipating the people on the jury are likely to be conservative, how they’re going to react to your case, and what you think they’ll do. That’s why typically, if I have personal injury case, if the person wants to go to trial I want to make sure that they carefully weigh their options and they consider the settlement offer. At the end of the day, Texas is Texas, and you’re going to have conservative juries. I think that makes Texas different from other states.
The diversity of Texas is also something that separates it from other states. Just because it’s a conservative jury doesn’t mean you can’t get a favorable verdict. It just means you have to understand the people and you have to maybe explain things differently to them. It varies from community to community. Now, a jury in Tarrant County is going to be different from a jury in Stephens County, or a jury in Dallas County is going to be different from a jury in Ellis County. So, you have to take that into account. It’s a large and complicated state.