Quotes from Joe Jamail

Do you know what the root of mediation is? Mediocrity!

Medical research is needed, and I just saw there was a need for help that the government - state or federal - was not spending the taxpayers' money on helping people get through college.

If you are not emotionally involved, your client is not getting your best effort.

There are more pompous, arrogant, self-centered, mediocre-type people running corporate America who should be sent out on some postal route delivering mail.

I don't want corporate America to think they can continue their duplicitous double-dealing.

We've got some well-run corporations by some well-intended people who do it right.

When I walk into a courtroom, I feel like I'm home.

I was taught that a lawyer was supposed to be a custodian of the community's legal and ethical sense.

The Depression did more to me than being a little Lebanese kid did.

I sent people to the penitentiary as fast as I could, never thinking about whether they deserved it.

I didn't do too well until my second year, when I realized that there were no right or wrong answers and that my professors were interested only in how well I could develop an argument.

It has been pointed out to me, more than once, that for someone who chose a profession steeped in procedure and protocol, I had little use for either.

I think the average American has forgotten the great feel for liberty and accountability that the framers of the Constitution believed.

If you start comparing my practice of law to what I could have been - selling bananas - you'll know why I gave money to the University of Texas.

That's a good feeling, to save your clients two billion dollars.

We can still do good for others and do good for ourselves. I would wither and die, truthfully. I need to be somewhere where the light's on me.

It's not a bad thing fighting for equality and helping the poor. It's not a bad thing to have on your professional tombstone: 'He believed in equality and he helped the poor.'

I think Wallace Hall is an imbecile.

When Frank Broyles coached at Arkansas, he used to have a golf tournament each year for all the Southwest Conference coaches.

I spent a year at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, then transferred back to the University of Texas, where I majored in English and history.

By not trying the small cases, the lawyers don't get the courtroom experience. So when the huge, bet-the-company cases come along, there are only a handful of trial lawyers who can handle it. That's why these big corporations still call us old-timers every day.

I don't think the trial practice is dead. But it is very ill. There are some days you could throw a hand grenade down the hall of the Harris County Courthouse and not hit anybody.

Any good trial lawyer knows that if you've got one credible expert or scientific study, then you can let the jury decide.

I can't describe the feeling I got the first time I won a jury award for an injured person.