© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(Oct. 6) – For six decades, Morris Atlas was the lawyer to see in South Texas.
Big corporations from across the globe facing potentially crippling lawsuits hired him to save their businesses. Candidates for public office cherished his endorsement. Lawyers who wanted judicial appointments desired his blessing.
Atlas died Sunday at his home in McAllen. He was 88.
Scott Atlas, his son and a lawyer in Houston, said that his father had been ill for a couple years, but that he died peacefully in his sleep with his family gathered around.
“My dad was a remarkable role model,” said Scott Atlas, who was a partner at Vinson & Elkins and Jones Day and is now the CEO of Atlas Counsel Search. “He never told us how to act. He showed us how to act. He taught us by example.”
Atlas, who was elected by his peers to the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers, developed a reputation as an outstanding trial lawyer early in his career.
In the mid-1950s, he won lawsuits that facilitated transportation of natural gas from the McAllen gas field to the market, which has helped the McAllen economy for generations. He had a strong professional relationship with former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, handling most of his legal work.
In the early 1960s, he represented the cities of McAllen and Brownsville in thwarting attempts by Harlingen officials to make its airport the sole regional airline facility in the Valley. If Atlas had lost, passenger air service to McAllen and Brownsville would no longer exist.
During that same period, Atlas worked with the U.S. ambassador to Mexico to negotiate in English and Spanish with the Mexican secretary of foreign relations to complete construction of the southern half of an international bridge over the Rio Grande to Reynosa, Mexico. The bridge replaced the original narrow, dangerous, and decrepit two-lane bridge.
In the 1970s, Morris represented former Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe in litigation that forced changes to the state’s flawed cattle disease testing program that was forcing ranchers across Texas to kill healthy cattle.
Born in 1926 in Houston, Atlas excelled in basketball and tennis. He graduated from San Jacinto High School in Houston and attended Texas A&M for one year, but then spent two years in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific at the end of World War II.
He graduated from the University of Texas in 1949 and UT Law School in 1950. While in college, he met Rita Willner. They married in 1947 and celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary last August.
Atlas opened a solo practice in 1950 in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. A year later, he joined Ewers, Cox, Port, Bentsen & Toothaker. He served as President of the Hidalgo County Bar Association in 1960.
Atlas served on the board of directors of Texas Regional Bancshares and Texas State Bank and he played a key role in the $2.16 billion merger with BBVA Compass.
In 1987, Lt. Gov Bill Hobby named Morris as special counsel to the Texas Senate in negotiations on early tort reform legislation. In 1989, he served in the same role on workers’ compensation and deceptive trade practice legislative reform.
Three Texas governors appointed Morris to three successive six-year terms on the Pan American College Board of Regents beginning in 1965, the year the school changed from a county-supported junior college to a state-supported college.
Three different governors appointed Atlas to three successive four-year terms on the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
Through it all, Atlas’ family says their father believed in integrity.
Scott Atlas said his father never explicitly talked to him about being a lawyer.
“Instead, my dad took me with him to court on interesting cases so I could see how much of a difference a good lawyer could make,” he said. “He taught me by example. He was thrilled when I went to law school and even more thrilled when I became a trial lawyer like him.”
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