Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann’s Mary Goodrich Nix, a native Texan, was always told growing up that she would be a lawyer.
There were influences all around her, from the family legacy of her great-grandfather being a judge in Waco to her father supplying her with thesauruses and dictionaries with notes of encouragement inside.
“My dad would find horoscopes about how I should become a lawyer, just things like that,” Nix said.
Nix recalled Catherine Crier being elected as judge of the 162nd District Court in Dallas in 1984. She was one of the youngest women elected to the bench.
“That influenced me as well, because it was a tangible example of a woman in our community doing big things in the legal community,” Nix said.
Nix earned her bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in 1992, where she discovered she really enjoyed statistics and marketing. After graduation, she took a marketing job, but she wasn’t passionate about it.
“I realized that if I was going to have an actual career where I was going to either own a business or be in an influential position in a company — or really make any money where I could live on my own, because I was still being supported in part by my parents — then I was going to need to get some higher education,” Nix said.
She decided to take the LSAT and apply to law school. Nix graduated with her law degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 1997.
When she applied to law school, she had no interest in trial work. But in her final year, she decided to do a mock trial competition for “fun” and placed second.
“I just fell in love with it,” Nix said. “I never looked back.”
Prior to joining Lynn Pinker, Nix was a partner at Holland & Knight. She said if she had two lives, she would work for both firms.
Last month, Nix had a win in Tarrant County for her client Binswanger, the nation’s leading residential and commercial glass company. The jury unanimously found three former employees, as well as corporate co-conspirators, owed $2 million in damages for misappropriation of confidential information.
Nix recently sat down with The Texas Lawbook to discuss the early days in her career and advice for young lawyers. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lawbook: What was your first job out of law school?
Nix: I immediately started working with John Howie for a summer internship that he was offering to a small handful of people to help him and Ladd Sanger with a trial that they were preparing for. And it was just a short opportunity, but that was really cool. John Howie passed away years ago, but he was the preeminent lawyer on personal injury litigation and air crash litigation. He was brilliant but also just a wonderful human being. He would come sit and have lunch with us and the other interns almost every day and just give us his thoughts on life and practice of law and what he thought. And his big thing was, if you really want to practice law, do not go into a really large firm, because you’re probably going to be stuck doing a lot of document review. It’s a nice place to be, but if you really want to be in the courtroom, that’s probably not the place to go. If you really want to be in the courtroom, then either go down the [District Attorney] route, because you’ll be in the courtroom all the time, or maybe do some insurance defense work or go to a smaller boutique firm.
Lawbook: What was your first trial?
Nix: My very first trial, I tried with Tab Keener when I was fresh out of law school. I worked with Tab Keener and Dana Ryan at a very small firm; that’s where I moved after I worked for John Howie, and he gave me the advice to go somewhere where I could get into trial work.
I was somehow put in contact with Dana Ryan, and she was a strong female trial lawyer, and that’s really what I wanted to be surrounded by at the time. She gave me an opportunity to come work there, and within a few months, I had two trials there with Tab. The first one was a medical malpractice matter. I remember having to learn about meniscus tears in the knee, and I did my first expert witness deposition during that time. We ended up in trial before Dallas County Judge David Evans. I did my first expert witness deposition during that time, and I learned all about meniscus tears in the knee. That was my very first trial. I’ll never forget it because it was so memorable to be there in front of Judge Evans – and we won.
Lawbook: When was your first time getting to lead a trial?
Nix: The first memorable trial that Michael [Hurst] and I led was when we were at Godwin Carlton. He always gave me increasingly more complex opportunities while at the firm. Pretty early on, we started splitting responsibilities where he would do voir dire, and I would do opening and then we would split the primary witnesses and that was early on in my career.
We had one case that was very memorable, because we’re still close to the family that we represented. It was a case where we represented a woman named Garlan Cunningham, and we filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Richeson Management – a master franchisee of Dairy Queens in Texas. Garlan was the regional manager for this Dairy Queen group, and the master franchisee group was run by two older women, and Garlan was older, she was late 50s or early 60s, and the other women were, I think, also in their 60s. They fired her in an act of pure, clear age discrimination. They wrote these terrible things about her being ‘long in the saddle’ — this is out in West Texas. It was really a disappointing thing to see that, especially when I was at that age, because you think that doesn’t really happen to people. Are people really that awful to other people? Unfortunately, sometimes they are — not very often, but sometimes they are.
I love being in a position to protect people who have been discriminated against. In this situation, there were just obvious written statements and statements made to other people that just made it absolutely clear that they had targeted her; they didn’t like how much they were paying her, they didn’t like that she was getting older, and they wanted this young guy to come in and take over. And so they fired her, and they had this young guy come and take over. She was devastated. She took it so personally, took it to heart. We didn’t settle. We ended up taking that to trial. It was in Judge [Jane] Boyle’s courtroom. John Ross from Thompson Coe was on the other side, and I had a lot of respect for him, and I still do. We ended up winning, and it changed her life — not so much because of the money, because it wasn’t a lot of money; it was just that she was vindicated. It went viral because of all the news agencies across the country — and all across the world; it was translated into all kinds of languages — because it was two older women who were found liable for age discrimination against another older woman. So it’s a sad thing, but it was also interesting to so many people that that had happened.
Lawbook: Have you gotten to work with Judge Barbara Lynn since she joined the firm? If so, what has that been like?
Nix: I have asked her, and she has agreed to get involved in giving me some advice on a couple of matters, which is invaluable, because they’re Northern District of Texas matters. I just ask, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” And she just jumps on it. She’s just a gem. She’s funny. And then her entire perspective of the practice of law, and her place in it, and her knowledge and understanding — she’s just a historical figure, really. She also just accepts her role as a mentor for pretty much all women; I mean, she just accepts that role flawlessly. It is a true joy to get to practice in the same firm as her.
Lawbook: What trends are you seeing in your practice area?
Nix: One of the biggest trends is AI and how that has developed and transitioned even over the last year. I was really introduced to AI about a year ago. We have Harvey here, and I was skeptical of it at first, but now I am a true believer. It is fascinating, honestly, what Harvey can do to help a lawyer.
I had a temporary injunction matter earlier this year, and there were six witnesses that we were going to either be defending or putting on, plus at least six other witnesses in a short period of time. In the discovery leading up to it, we had multiple employees from whom we needed to gather documents and data, and then there were depositions being taken, but then we were also trying to prep them for this hearing, and Harvey was an invaluable tool at that time. We put some information into it, and it could help us develop themes and understand where the plaintiffs’ themes were probably going to come from. That helped us prepare for the hearing. I still could have prepared for it just fine without Harvey, but it took it up another level, and I became a true believer after that experience.
I like to play around with it because how good your input is determines just how good the output is. On the weekends, I’ll just be playing around with it to try and figure out what AI needs in order to give what you’re really looking for. It’s limited, it’s not a human, but it can do a lot of really interesting things. It does deposition summaries really, really well. It summarizes petitions and documents really well.
Lawbook: What advice do you have for young lawyers?
Nix: There are more women now than there were from the generations before me, but there’s still not a lot of women my age doing trial law. I always feel an immediate connection with another woman around my age that does trial law, because they understand things about our life and our work that a lot of other people couldn’t possibly understand — especially women who are married with children, because it’s just a different life.
It’s really hard. It’s always hard. You have to have a really strong work ethic to work as a trial lawyer, because it isn’t a job that ever shuts down. It’s not a nine-to-five. It’s worth it, but when you’re young and you’re starting a family and you’re thinking about the future, it’s easy to get mired down into the what-ifs. Let’s not get mired down in the future because you don’t know where you’re going in the future. You’ve got to take this job day by day, especially when you’re young, because your whole job as a young attorney is to learn how to be a lawyer and to spend as much time as possible in those formative years where you’re being given work opportunities to learn to take advantage of every opportunity. Try not to say no.
Leaning into the opportunities as they arise, not worrying too much about the future, because the future is going to take care of itself. Spending more time worried about how I take advantage of the opportunities that are being presented to me at this moment. If you worry too much about the future, it could drive you crazy.
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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