When James Ho left the Dallas office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in January to become a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the law firm searched for an appellate law expert to replace him.
They did not have to look far.
Allyson Ho, a nationally respected U.S. Supreme Court advocate and wife of now-federal appellate judge Jim Ho, is moving her commercial appellate practice Monday from Morgan Lewis in Dallas to Gibson Dunn, where she will be the firm’s newest partner.
In fact, Ho will be in the very same office her husband vacated five months ago in Uptown Dallas across from the Ritz Carlton.
“After Jim left for the federal bench, the move seemed to make sense,” Ho said in an exclusive interview with The Texas Lawbook. “Year in and year out, Gibson is the highest rated litigation practice in the nation and Gibson has made Texas a priority.
“This is a bit of homecoming for me, because I was a summer associate at Gibson during law school and because it gives me a chance to work with colleagues that I have long known and admired,” she said.
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Gibson Dunn Dallas office managing partner Rob Walters said Ho, who has now argued four cases before the Supreme Court and dozens of cases to the Fifth Circuit, Texas Supreme Court and other appellate courts, was the obvious choice.
“By any objective standard, Allyson is one of the elite appellate players in our part of the world,” he said. “We’ve known Allyson for many years – both through Jim and because of her own extraordinary achievements – and she is a superb person.
“Allyson and Jim are legal royalty in Texas,” Walters said. “They are well-connected politically.”
Gibson Dunn now has 60 lawyers in Dallas and 20 attorneys in Houston.
Born and raised in Houston, Ho was the first in her family to become a lawyer. Her father was an architect. Her mother was a writer and teacher.
“I inherited my mother’s love for the written word,” she said.
Ho graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University in 1988 and received her doctorate in English literature from Rice University in 1994.
The practice of law was not even a consideration. Instead, she accepted a teaching position at Asbury College in Kentucky, where she taught literature until 1998.
“Some of my students were applying to law school and I started considering it,” she said. “I saw law as a way to combine my love for the written word and writing with a way to have a more real-world impact.”
Ho selected the University of Chicago School of Law, where she met a fellow student, Jim Ho, at a Federalist Society meeting. The pair did not start dating until a couple years later when they were clerking for different appellate judges on the Fifth Circuit. She clerked for Judge Jacques Wiener. Two years later, the duo also clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justices – Jim Ho clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Allyson Ho clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Ho’s meteoric rise continued in 2004 when she served as legal counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft on issues related to Homeland Security and immigration enforcement. She also worked one year as special counsel to President George W. Bush on various legal policy matters.
Allyson and Jim Ho moved to Dallas in 2006. She joined the appellate section of Baker Botts, while her husband worked at Gibson Dunn.
Law Firm Dominos
In 2008, the couple made career moves that started when then-Texas Solicitor Ted Cruz left the state government to head the appellate practice at Morgan Lewis in Dallas. Jim Ho replaced him as the state’s solicitor general and Cruz convinced Allyson Ho to join him.
Jim Ho went back to Gibson Dunn in December 2010 and was later appointed to co-head its national appellate team. Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate and Allyson Ho replaced him as the firm’s co-head of appellate.
“I hate to sound too Pollyannaish but I love my work as an appellate lawyer,” she said. “I enjoy brief writing – aiming to make it perfect and really making a brief sing.”
In 2014, Ho was the only woman to argue multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, she did two oral arguments in a three-week period. In 2017, she argued two more cases at the nation’s highest court, including Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, which is one of the most important patent cases of the past decade.
Lawyers who have seen Ho argue before the Supreme Court and other appellate courts say that she has a unique ability to identify the issues that judges find perplexing and make arguments that explain her client’s position in a simple, clear manner.
Interestingly, Allyson and Jim Ho have never worked together for a client on a case and they have never opposed each other in court.
In fact, the couple has only seen each other make oral arguments in court one time. In doing so, they made Texas legal history when they became the first husband and wife to argue separate cases before the Texas Supreme Court on the same day.
In October 2016, Allyson Ho represented Pepsi-Cola Metropolitan Bottling in a dispute over personal jurisdiction against M&F Worldwide. The same day, Jim Ho represented an amicus in a case involving Mexican convenience store giant Cadena Comercial which was in a retail liquor permit dispute with the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission.
“We didn’t talk about it after – kind of like the rule about law school exams,” Allyson Ho said. “But he was brilliant as always.”