Houston native and Yetter Coleman partner Tim McConn felt called to practice law. He was practically raised on it.
Growing up, his father and great-uncle, both lawyers, would regale the family with stories of courtroom drama and cross-examinations.
“I just loved how they were great storytellers,” McConn said.
His family also loved the University of Notre Dame, where his father and an uncle had studied. But his father, in an attempt to potentially dissuade him from attending the university, told him they had to visit campus during the winter.
“It totally backfired on my dad, because I absolutely loved it,” McConn said.
Taking a constitutional law class as an undergraduate cinched the idea that he would go to law school.
“Just seeing sort of all the intellectual firepower that goes into trying to prove that you’re right, I really like that,” McConn said. “Between sort of the storytelling aspect of it that I saw with my dad and my great uncle, and then the intellectual curiosity and the debate and the rigor of the back and forth, I really thought those things all went together in a way, for me, that called me to do this.”
After graduating from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in government and philosophy in 1998, McConn returned home to attend the University of Texas School of Law, where he graduated in 2001.
From there, he joined Mayor, Day, Caldwell & Keaton, which merged with Andrews Kurth just a month later. He practiced there for almost 15 years before joining Yetter Coleman, where, in June, he celebrated a decade with the firm.
It’s been a busy year for McConn, who tried a case in Denver in April and immediately began prepping for another jury trial in Houston. He’s now in North Dakota for a two-week arbitration.
McConn recently sat down with The Texas Lawbook to discuss leading his first trial on his own and the most memorable moment of his career so far. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lawbook: What has been a memorable experience or moment in your career?
McConn: A couple of years ago, we tried a case in Santa Barbara, California. We represented a company called Venoco — actually, we represented the litigation trustee that was appointed by the bankruptcy court when Venoco went into bankruptcy. They had claims against a company called Plains All American that’s based here in Houston. The trustee hired us to pursue those claims on his behalf against Plains All American, and it was a case that went on for over five years.
We were in California federal court. The judge dismissed our case on a motion to dismiss that Plains had filed on a very technical legal issue. We went up on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and initially we lost. But there was a companion case going on in the California state appellate court against Plains by a different plaintiff, and we essentially helped that other plaintiff convince the California appellate court that the dismissal was incorrect. And so once heard, we were able to go back to the federal court, the Ninth Circuit, and say, “Look, this is a state law issue. The California state court has now told you what the law is, and so you should change your mind.” The Ninth Circuit did, and so they sent it back to the federal district court, and we were able to convince him that he no longer had jurisdiction, and so he sent it over to California state court in Santa Barbara, and so we went from being in a federal court in Los Angeles to a state court in Santa Barbara.
That was a big deal because this whole thing was based on an oil spill of a pipeline that Plains All American operated along the coast of Santa Barbara, and the oil spill there was a big oil spill from that pipeline onto the beach and into the ocean right there in Santa Barbara. Everybody knew about it. They clearly don’t like oil companies, generally, but they were mad at Plains, and so it was a good venue for us to be in.
The oil spill had caused our client, which was also an oil and gas company, to go out of business because that pipeline was the only route for our client’s oil to get from where they were drilling and producing it to the refinery. And so, when that pipeline went down, we couldn’t get our oil to the refinery. We couldn’t sell it, and it was our biggest asset. And so they had to file for bankruptcy, and so we pursued a claim that basically said, “Your negligence forced us to go out of business. The value of this oil and gas property that we could have developed if you hadn’t busted that pipeline and caused us to go out of business was in the $300 million or $400 million range.” Plains fought it, and they fought it for years.
We went up on all these appeals. We came back. We finally got to go to trial in July of 2024, and it took us three weeks just to pick a jury because it was such a sensitive issue in Santa Barbara that the judge granted Plains’ request to essentially interview every single panelist back in chambers, and we went through like 175, I believe, almost 200. So it took us three weeks just to pick the jury, and then we spent a month and a half putting on our case. And it took a long time because we would only get three days a week, basically, to try our case, and so it just took a long time. But right as we were finishing up our case, and we were up against lawyers from Munger, Tolles & Olson, which is one of the premier firms in Los Angeles, maybe the best trial firm on the West Coast, certainly one of the best. The chair of their firm, who’s just an amazing trial lawyer, was on the other side, and we were fighting this tooth and nail.
Paul [Yetter], Tracy [LeRoy], and I were trying this, and it was going so well for us that once we were about to put on our damage expert, I got a call from the mediator who said, “They want to talk settlement,” and so we paused the trial, and we spent a couple days negotiating, and we ended up settling for $100 million, and that was a peak moment for me in our firm. $100 million for our client was just a huge success for them, and we had it on a contingent fee, and so it was a huge success for our firm, and I remember the moment that Tracy and I called the rest of our partners to say we had just settled for $100 million. It was just this huge celebration, and so that was a peak moment for me in my career.
That case will probably always be the most memorable case of my career, at least up to this point.
Lawbook: Do you have a post-trial celebration?
McConn: We try to have a post-trial celebration for every trial. We had a big dinner in Santa Barbara. It was interesting; we thought we had settled on a Friday, and so we took the whole team out to this great restaurant in Santa Barbara and had this big, wonderful dinner, and everybody very much enjoyed themselves. Then we spent the weekend trying to sort of finalize the settlement, and most of our team went home.
By Monday, it looked like the settlement was going to blow up, and Tracy and I and a couple others had stayed in Santa Barbara to finalize the settlement so that we could announce it to the court on Monday. Well, Monday morning came, and we were telling everybody to get back on planes to come back out to Santa Barbara because we thought that we were going to have to get back into trial. We had three or four of our lawyers and paralegals automatically coming back when we finally, finally, finally finalized the settlement, and so we had a second celebratory dinner that night because people had come back, and then I actually got to go to the Sturgill Simpson concert in Santa Barbara that night, which was fun too.
So much of what we do depends on the camaraderie and the collegiality and the sort of culture of being together. And so, certainly, after we have a big trial like that, whether we win or lose, or if it’s a bench trial or an arbitration, we have to wait. We still make a point of getting out and getting the team together and making sure everybody understands how much we appreciate the work they put into it. And it’s not just the lawyers. I mean, it’s the staff, the paralegals, our jury consultant, our trial graphics guy. I mean, everybody is a key part of the team, and so they’re always included in the celebrations, just like they’re included in the team meetings and the strategy sessions as we’re getting ready for trial and when we’re in trial. We don’t exclude those people from our meetings. We want them to be in the meeting because we want everybody to be on the same page, and we want to hear their input too.
We use a guy named Bronson Parker as our hot seat during trial, and he’s the one who’s putting all the exhibits up and helping us highlight exhibits and move things around on the fly during trial. Every night after trial, we have our meeting where we get all of our lawyers and our paralegals and everybody to come in to eat dinner and to talk about what happened that day and what’s going to happen the next day, and Bronson’s just a good example. He always has great insight into how things are going in trial because he’s sitting there watching, and he’s new to the case, and so he’s an exemplar juror, and he can tell us what’s working, what’s not. He’s also watching the jury, so he can see how they’re responding or not responding to things.
We make sure that they know they’re part of the team, and we want their input throughout the case and throughout the trial. And so, once we finish the trial, we go celebrate. They’re just as much a part of the team then as they were during the case, and so it’s from start to finish, it’s a full team, and so it’s a full team celebration.
Lawbook: What was your first trial?
McConn: It was a case in Lavaca County. It was an oil and gas case that I worked on with Dillon Ferguson. But we actually didn’t work on that much together because he came into my office. I was probably like, gosh, this was in 2006 that I tried that case. So I was a fifth-year lawyer. He walked into my office probably a year before that and said, “Hey, I’ve got this client who’s been sued. I want you to handle it. I’m confident that you can handle it. It’s an oil and gas case, and if you need anything from me, just let me know. But it’s your case. You’re going to handle it.” And I did. I would bounce ideas off of Dillon from time to time. I took the case from start to finish, presented my client for deposition, deposed the representatives of the plaintiff’s company that had sued him. There was a co-defendant that was pointing fingers at my client too, and so I had to deal with them as well.
I tried the case basically by myself. I had a paralegal who went with me, and I had an appellate lawyer who helped me with the jury charge. But at trial, I was the only lawyer representing my client. It was the first time I tried a jury trial by myself. It was probably the first time I was lead counsel by myself. We got a full jury verdict in favor of our client, which was great. Both against the claims that the plaintiffs had brought against him, but also the claims that the co-defendant had brought against him, and we settled with them, and they ended up paying my client money, even though they had sued him. Boone Exploration was the plaintiff, and my client was a company called TimeSlice Technology.
We tried that in the old courthouse, and it is a beautiful courthouse, right in the middle of the town square. When we picked the jury, I mean, there were people in this beautiful courtroom spread out. It’s like a setting right out of a movie courtroom from the 1920s or 30s. It was a step back in time. But what was great about that was when the jury was out, and we were waiting for the jury to come back. I’ll never forget this. I walked outside of the courthouse just to get outside for a few minutes and get some fresh air, and just think about, gosh, what am I going to do if the jury comes back against my client? And I ran into the plaintiff’s representative we cross-examined during the trial, and he looked at me, and he said, “It pains me to say this, but you were the best lawyer in this trial.” And I never expected to hear that from anybody ever, but to hear it from the plaintiff in a case where I’m just a baby lawyer trying this case by myself for the first time, it was pretty incredible.
Lawbook: What trends are you seeing in your practice area?
McConn: I know you’ve heard a lot about the business courts, but that’s certainly one. And more of our cases are ending up in the business courts, not surprisingly. But what’s interesting there for me in my practice is that so many of my cases are oil and gas related, and a lot of those are cases that have to be filed in West Texas because there are fights over who owns the oil and gas property, who owns the mineral interests, and under the Texas venue rules, if you’re fighting about real property, you have to file where that real property is located, so we end up in Midland or Reeves County or Ward County, which are just sort of west and southwest of Midland. We have a lot of cases out there, and a lot of those cases are ones that meet the monetary thresholds and the jurisdictional requirements to be in the business court, but there is no business court out there.
The legislature set it up so there would be business courts in all areas of the state, but they only funded five of them. And so it’s great that we have them here in Houston, and we’re active in the Houston business court. We’ve got cases in the Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio business courts. I mean, I personally have one in San Antonio, Dallas, and then a few in Houston. But our firm has those cases in all of those. But we don’t have any in West Texas because there is no business court. So it’ll be interesting to see.
There has been an effort to try to figure out ways to get those cases into the Houston business courts, but there’s really no way you can do that if it involves real property interest, and so you’re still seeing these big, high-dollar oil and gas disputes being litigated out in the courts of West Texas, the district courts of West Texas, which are fine. I mean, they’re good courts. We enjoy being in the Midland district courts. We’ve had good success there, and we have in front of the judges in Reeves County and Ward County as well.
But it will be interesting to see if there’s an effort at some point to get a business court that governs those disputes because those are, as I said, those are high-dollar disputes involving I think most would agree is the most important industry in the state, and yet we don’t have a business court for those for those cases yet, and the judges out there are doing, and I’m not saying you need one necessarily, but those courts out there are general jurisdiction courts, right? They are dealing with not just civil cases, but also family law cases, criminal cases, and so their dockets are pretty stacked with lots of different cases, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the industry really pushes to get a business court established out there and funded out there.
I would say one of the other trends, of course, is AI, and we’re seeing that in our firm and in our cases because we’ve embraced it. We use Harvey, among other AI tools, but it’s especially been helpful. It’s helpful in all our cases, particularly as we’re going to trial and getting ready for trial; it can be incredibly helpful with strategy and to really pressure test your case. And as you’re going through trial, as you continue to feed the trial transcripts and the exhibits into these AI tools, they’re incredibly helpful in helping you figure out, “OK, what points have we made? What points have we not made? Which exhibits are the important ones? Which are the ones we really need to continue to reinforce?” And all of this is very helpful.
But what’s also been very helpful is on our plaintiff’s side cases, which we do a fair amount of, and we’re doing typically on a sort of a contingent fee kind of arrangement where we have skin in the game and our time and money are at risk. It’s really important to be efficient in those cases, right? We want to be if we want to make sure that that we’re using everybody’s time and resources as efficiently as possible, because we’re not being paid by the hour, and now with these AI tools that we have at our disposal, we can review documents and identify key documents and prepare for depositions much faster and much more efficiently than we could before, and so it really helps us keep our investment into the case at a manageable level, as opposed to having to put 20 people on a contingent fee case.
We can put five people on it and have the same output and the same success. And I know that scares some people when they hear, “Oh, we’re going from 20 to five.” Does that mean 15 people are losing their jobs? No, it means that we can deploy people on higher-level tasks and help train them on higher-level tasks that we will support.
Now our younger lawyers are getting more and better and higher-level and higher-quality experience at a young age because instead of having to spend all their time, or most of their time, reviewing thousands and thousands and thousands of documents, we could use these tools to make those processes go quicker, and allow them to then take the outputs from those from those tools and use them to figure out case strategy for who we’re going to depose, and then actually go take those depositions and then be involved in trial strategy and trial prep, and then actually get a role at trial. And so, and you saw that in Denver. I had two of my young lawyers, one of my young partners, and one of our associates. They got to take multiple witnesses at trial. And in the Houston case, the week after that, same thing. I had one of our younger senior counsel, and then a young associate who did most of the examinations at trial, and so this has sort of made our case management more efficient, and it’s also freed up our young lawyers to get trained up and to have the opportunities to do the sort of stand-up things that we all really want to do and hope to do at some point.
Lawbook: How was it for you to go from a verdict in Denver on a Friday afternoon to jury selection in Houston on a Monday morning?
McConn: It was pretty much, “We’ve got to go!” I mean, thankfully, we were fully prepared and ready, but there was still work I had to do to get my brain back into the case. We flew out that Friday. I landed in Houston, I think, at 1 a.m. Friday night, Saturday morning. But on that flight, my paralegal had already put together a package for me of the opening statement as it’s currently drafted, here’s the cross-examination of the main defense witness that you’re going to do, and so there was already a package waiting for me, and so I got on that plane, and I immediately started preparing for the opening statement. I got a little bit of breathing room because Saturday we found out that the judge was pushing the start of our trial back from Monday to Tuesday or Wednesday. I ended up taking a little bit of time off on that Saturday to actually spend some time with my family, but then I was back that afternoon. I might as well have been out of town again, right? Because I was sort of knee-deep in trial preparations.
We ended up starting on Tuesday with picking a jury.
The one thing that I needed to spend some more time on that I really hadn’t had a chance to was jury selection, and so that’s what I spent most of my time on. Between coming back from Denver and starting the trial in Houston, I was really figuring out how I was going to do voir dire, which, by the way, has become my favorite part of a trial. I love getting up in front of 60 people or 100 people or however many it was, and talking to them and hearing about their experiences. That takes a lot of work to get ready for, and that’s helped a lot of young lawyers who just don’t get a lot of experience doing it, and I’m glad that I had a group of young lawyers in these two cases who could be there to watch and learn how that works because they need to know how to pick a jury too.
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:
Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann’s Mary Goodrich Nix looks back on her early years as a trial lawyer. She also shares advice she would give to young lawyers and discusses trends she sees impacting the practice.
FBFK’s Solomon Wisenberg talks about how he got involved in the Whitewater-Lewinsky investigation and what trends he is seeing in his white collar criminal defense practice. While the Texan spent most of his career in Washington, D.C., he returned home to the Lone Star state a few years ago and joined FBFK in December.
Third Court of Appeals Justice Rosa Lopez Theofanis shares how she sees AI impacting the appellate process and dishes on what lawyers practicing before her shouldn’t do. Justice Theofanis, who is the first sitting judge to participate in Asked & Answered, joined the all-female panel in January 2023.
King & Spalding partner Bruce Hurley reflected on his career and being recently named trial lawyer of the year by the Texas chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. Hearing stories from family who were trial lawyers pushed him toward becoming a trial lawyer himself.
McKool Smith’s Sam Baxter, who recently retired, reflects on his 56-year career. While he is known for his work trying intellectual property cases in the Eastern District of Texas, he started out as a prosecutor and judge.