McKool Smith’s Sam Baxter, who recently retired, spent the bulk of his 56-year career trying intellectual property cases in the Eastern District of Texas. But tracing his route there requires a trip back to high school.
The Texan loved debate in high school, and he decided to make a career out of it. He graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1970.
He spent the first decade of his career as a prosecutor and later served as a judge in Harrison County. He joined McKool Smith in 1995 and, unlike the common practice of today, started practicing IP law without an engineering degree.
“We were at the forefront of getting that [Eastern District of Texas patent] docket going,” he said. “And bringing cases for the plaintiff sort of seemed like a natural transition, and we thought (Marshall) was the next big place that the law was going to be. And it turned out that was right.”
Some highlights of his career include securing a more than $663 million final judgment in a high-profile False Claims Act case against Trinity Industries and reaching a $1.4 billion settlement for the state of Texas against Meta.
“Sam is an icon in the Texas legal community, and many in the profession are fortunate to call him a mentor, a friend and a teacher,” David Sochia, the chairman and managing principal of McKool Smith, said in a press release. “We will certainly miss Sam’s presence in the firm, but we will always remember the profound impact he has had on McKool Smith and the invaluable contributions he has made to the profession.”
Baxter recently sat down with The Texas Lawbook to reflect on his career, his decision to retire and where he sees the profession going. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lawbook: Why retire now? What was your motivation?
Baxter: Well, I’m 80 years old. It’s just getting harder and harder to keep up and to do this stuff. It’s really a younger person’s game. And I thought, well, this is it, I don’t have a really good case going right now … the young kids can handle it.
Lawbook: Looking ahead, what do you see happening in the future with IP cases? What trends do you expect we will see?
Baxter: From a trial lawyer’s standpoint, the future is still pretty good, because those cases are going to get tried once. You can’t get an automatic injunction in the patent case like you could when I started out; a lot of those cases go to trial. It’s just a question of dollars, but it’s big dollars, and so you’ve got to gear yourself up to have the long fight. But the amount of discovery now is just appalling. And with some lawyers and some law firms on the other side, you know that you’re going to have motions fights all the time right up until the end — and I don’t think that’s good for the profession, but it’s the way the world is.
Lawbook: What was the best advice you received in your legal career?
Baxter: The best advice I ever got was from an old lawyer who said, “If you just treat people with respect, including the other side, it’ll pay dividends.” Getting into needless fights and discovery motions and being in acrimonious situations with the other side just didn’t seem to make much sense. And it turns out, in fact, if you treat people right, they’ll end up doing the right thing for you; they’ll treat you back, right? And so the best advice I got was just to treat people like you want them to treat you. That turns out to be really good advice.
Lawbook: Alternatively, what was the worst advice you have ever received?
Baxter: It was probably to take a case that didn’t turn out very well. It was expensive, but … that game of picking the right cases is tough.
Lawbook: What will you miss the most about practicing law?
Baxter: The camaraderie with my partners and with the people on the other side — just the interaction of people with really good minds that are interesting people that do interesting work. I’m going to miss all of that.
Lawbook: How has the practice changed throughout your career?
Baxter: Certainly, the amount of discovery that you have to do now was not around when I first started practicing law. You used to go over to that courthouse with maybe three or four documents in it, and you’d go try your case. Now you go with boxes and boxes and a horde of people to do what we used to do on a shoestring. The amount of discovery and the amount of motions that you have to deal with are certainly a new factor in the practice of law that I wish you could wave away, but it’s the way of the world now.
Lawbook: What skills does a young lawyer need to be successful in the IP area? What advice do you have?
Baxter: If you’re at the edge of that case, that is, you need to be scientific, you’ve got to be an engineer, or whatever it is, then certainly you need to sharpen those skills. But the real factor, once again, is just putting yourself in the shoes of the other side, and what motivates them, and what you can do to get them to do what you think they ought to be doing in the case? And it’s just treating people well.
Lawbook: What case was the hardest fought?
Baxter: It may have been a pipeline case, where there were some high feelings in a class action. That was a pretty tough case, but we got it all worked out at the end of the day. It worked out well for our client. That was hard.
Early in my career, I had a bunch of child murder cases and child abuse cases, and those are always just really hard cases, because emotions are so bad, and you’ve got some poor little 2-or-3-year-old victim or younger than that, and those cases were incredibly hard to deal with. I prosecuted a lady for killing her 3-year-old son by hitting him against the wall and putting him back into bed with his brother, where he died. Those cases were always traumatic.
Lawbook: Do you have a case that mattered the most to you?
Baxter: You hope to treat them all about the same, and you’re trying to do the best for your client. But I think probably when I was a prosecutor trying to get some measure of relief for the victim’s family or the victim themselves, that was always satisfying.
Lawbook: If you could change something about the practice, what would it be?
Baxter: I would move to cut down all or most of the discovery fights. I think that would be the best thing we could do to keep the cases going, but there’s a certain amount of it you’ve got to do. By and large, the system works so well. They particularly work so well out here in Marshall. We have really great judges on the bench; Judge (T. John) Ward and Judge (Rodney) Gilstrap have just been extraordinarily good at handling these cases. Judge Gilstrap tries more patent cases than anybody in the country and does a really great job doing it. And so those two and other people in the Eastern District have been great about getting these cases tried and getting them moved, and that’s a benefit to everybody.
Lawbook: Do you have any career regrets?
Baxter: Oh, probably so, but no use looking back on those; there’s probably a case or two that we wish we might have handled differently and gotten better results. But by and large, no, I certainly didn’t regret being a lawyer, and I didn’t regret being involved in these cases.
And I sure didn’t regret being a trial lawyer, because that’s where the action is.
Lawbook: Anything else you would like to add?
Baxter: The thing that struck me is that, particularly among my law partners, is that people who are honorable and really appreciate the system and how it works get so much further in their career than people who are hard to get along with or contentious and game the system; they just don’t do as well.
And so the best advice I can give a young lawyer is to act with integrity and keep your head down and work hard.
If you or someone you know would like to be profiled in a future edition of Asked & Answered, please let us know at tlblitigation@texaslawbook.net. Check out our other Asked & Answered interviews below:
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Beck Redden partner Russell Post shared how he went from resisting the idea of attending law school to contemplating a career as a law professor. For Post, who recently secured a win at the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming a law professor is no longer a goal of his, but teaching isn’t out of the question.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Chris Porter discussed what he loves about being a trial lawyer, his early dreams of being a restaurateur and how the door closing on his football career opened other opportunities.
Hilgers partner David Sillers talked about his First Amendment practice and shared the most memorable moments in his career so far. Sillers recently joined the firm and reunited with managing partner Grant Schmidt and partner Cynthia Schmidt, whom he met while clerking alongside them for former U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn.