The first trial Bob Hilliard handled after hanging out his own shingle was that of Donnie Contreras, a young man left paraplegic from a high school shooting who then suffered burns in the shower of his Dallas Holiday Inn hotel room. Contreras sued Holiday Inn, and the jury awarded $500,000, more than Hilliard had sought.
Hilliard tells that story to get to another story.
“You gotta hear the rest,” Hilliard said in a January interview with The Texas Lawbook.
Several years later, Hilliard met Dax Cowart at a trial lawyers’ program in Wyoming created by the legendary Gerry Spence. Cowart, a former Air Force pilot in the Vietnam War, was blind and disfigured from a gas explosion in East Texas. He had wanted to die, but doctors treated him against his insistence.
Hilliard persuaded Cowart to move to Corpus Christi to work in Hilliard’s firm. Cowart won a $7.4 million jury verdict in his first trial on behalf of a plaintiff paralyzed from an on-the-job injury. Cowart’s feat — and his singing a Bob Dylan verse in his closing argument — garnered media attention. He went on to become a prominent patient-rights advocate. ABC’s 20/20 dedicated a moving segment to Cowart in 1999.
Hilliard’s former client-turned-friend Contreras called Hilliard one day looking for some way to inspire his daughter who was in a rut. Hilliard sent him a VHS tape of the 20/20 program on Cowart, saying, “This will inspire anybody.”
Contreras was hysterical when he called again. When Contreras was in the hospital following the shooting that paralyzed him, Contreras prayed with another patient who wasn’t expected to live through the night. Contreras assumed the man died. Until he watched the 20/20 episode.
“I can hardly even tell the story without crying,” Hilliard said.
But he continues the story to explain the reason he is passionate about the legal work he does.
Hilliard by now has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was on the forefront of litigation against General Motors over its faulty ignition switches. And he helped free a man from prison for a fatal car wreck that Hilliard proved was the result of an auto defect in a lawsuit against Toyota that netted an $11.4 million jury verdict.
But the story about Contreras and Cowart is emblematic of a larger theme in his career.
“Those two seemingly unconnected events more than 15 years apart remind me of how unforeseen and fulfilling the destination can be on this journey to justice,” Hilliard said.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Lawbook: What’s keeping you busy right now?
Bob Hilliard: Besides the bigger cases that we have in the office, the products liability cases, the Astroworld litigation, which is winding down. I’m taking a hard look at the fires in California. We’ve already signed up some cases. I think that’s going to be a mammoth litigation. We’re also taking a hard look at Big Food, going after ultra-processed food addiction and how that was an intentional decision when Big Tobacco bought Big Food. There’s one lawsuit that has been filed already by Morgan & Morgan and Seeger Weiss, but I’ve teamed up with a couple of other big guns in the country, and we’re in the final drafting stages of our complaint.
The Lawbook: Are there one or two high profile public matters that you are currently involved in that we can highlight?
Hilliard: My Austin firm is involved in some gun litigation on behalf of the country of Mexico against the major gun manufacturers for allowing illegal weapons to go across into Mexico. They lost at the trial court in Boston, they won at the court of appeals, and SCOTUS just granted cert, so we’ll see where that goes.
The Lawbook: What news developments or trends in law are you particularly keeping an eye on at the moment?
Hilliard: Big Food. To me, it’s just like when Big Tobacco was sued initially. The initial defense was, “They choose to smoke, they could quit if they want to.” I suspect that the first hurdle in Big Food is going to be that initial change of mindset in the storyline, and that is, “This is not a fair argument, given the intentional, addictive ingredients unnecessarily in food.” You take the exact same food from the United States and Europe — the ingredients in the United States food have 15 extra addictive components not present to make that particular food what it is [but are] only present to make sure that you and me and our kids are going to crave Fruit Loops or Cheez-Its or whatever it is. I really think that it’s a social justice issue.
The Lawbook: What is a trial that you weren’t involved in that you wish you had been?
Hilliard: I was half a generation late for Big Tobacco. I think that was a real social justice shift in America when that happened. To me, those were the titans of the Texas bar who we all watched and learned from and hopefully followed somewhat in their footsteps. They had a lot of courage to take on Big Tobacco before the trend had started.
But mostly, if I like the case, I get involved in it. I think we led the way in the GM ignition switch case when we started. I think I got the first call in the country from a victim out of Wisconsin, and we learned that this wasn’t going to be an economic loss MDL, which is how it was filed. Initially it was filed as people with this ignition switch problem have a monetary loss to the value of their car because of it. But when there was the first hearing in front of Judge Jesse Furman out of the Southern District of New York, I flew up there and I said, “I think this is going to be a robust personal injury case.”
The Lawbook: Do you have any pre-trial rituals?
Hilliard: For every big trial, I have to go up the week before because I have to be settled in. I usually open up the war room a week before trial. My war room is a 24-hour war room. I operate best starting about 2 a.m. So I know that during trial, I just have to, number one, be extremely in shape to survive that. I spend my time here when I’m not in trial, making sure that I eat right. I exercise a lot. And I get ready, because it’s a grind.
The Lawbook: What is your exercise of choice?
Hilliard: When I’m in trial, I don’t exercise. When I’m in trial, all I do is work. But here, I go out with the health director for our law firm. He shows up in my backyard at 9:30 a.m., and I treat it like it’s a hearing or a deposition. Nothing interferes with this block of time, because if you don’t take care of your health, your health will take care of you. So we spend every single day from 9:30 a.m. to about 11 a.m., doing both strength and cardio. We usually get in an ice bath after that. I find I can go back to work immediately. I’m not exhausted.
The Lawbook: Do many other law firms have health directors or is this unique?
Hilliard: I just started my law firm by myself with a Radio Shack phone, and I didn’t have any training on how a law firm is supposed to run. I’ve always just done what I think seems right, so I don’t keep up with how law firms handle their cases, for example. Our health director is a certified trainer. He does monthly get-togethers at the firm where he brings in third parties — for example, a dermatologist to talk about the dangers of exposure to the sun in South Texas. He puts on exercise clinics once a week where people come in or Zoom in and participate. He’s always available for one-on-one training.
The Lawbook: What is your favorite task to handle at trial?
Hilliard: I like voir dire and opening statement a lot. I like to take the plaintiff through their story. The cross-examination of experts. And then I love to close. I’m not passing the baton to anybody to do anything at trial.
The Lawbook: The whole trial is your favorite.
Hilliard: I really feel like you have to have a relationship with the jury, and if you try a case by committee with six plaintiffs lawyers doing six different things, it’s not the same. If you do the voir dire, and you learn about people, and then you tell the story in opening statement, and then they watch you do the direct and they watch you both do well, and they watch you lose an objection and stumble a little bit, then they get vested in the person they’re seeing and the story he’s telling.
I have found over the 100-plus cases I’ve tried in the 40 years I’ve done it, that everybody feels the same thing. They have gotten to that feeling by a completely different fact pattern in their life. If you talk about the loss of someone you love, everyone knows what that feels like, even though who they lost and who the plaintiff lost is completely different. If you can get to what that feeling means to me personally, as the lawyer of the plaintiff, they will feel the familiar pain of the same feeling, even though they and I may not have gotten to it the same way. And so the authenticity that allows them to understand needs to have the connection that comes from seeing the primary attorney do most of the things over the course of the trial, because then they are connected both to the client, the story and the storyteller.
The Lawbook: How do you celebrate after a trial win?
Hilliard: It’s like that sign that they have posted at Wimbledon before you walk out on Centre Court [that includes an excerpt of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”] that says “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same … you’ll be a man, my son.” And so I don’t get too high on the victories and too low on the defeats. I know that they both will come in my life and in my future. I know they’re both really imposters. They don’t define or affect who I am. And I find that that steady keel gives me longevity. I’ll have a nice dinner with the trial team and a week’s rest, win or lose.
The Lawbook: If you weren’t a lawyer, what career do you think you would have chosen instead?
Hilliard: I’d be a professor of literature. English literature was my major. I was able to teach a little bit my senior year in college. I have my favorite books of poetry, books of quotes and authors that I take with me to every trial in a box called “Bob’s Trial Box.” I’ll refer to them, because what I have found is that throughout history, everything has happened before. Great loss, great injustice. And I want to see how the greatest writers of all time have described them, and how they convey it, and how clearly they can make their readers feel it.
The Lawbook: What are one or two of those books in your trial box?
Hilliard: I have Mark Twain. I have a book called Lincoln, which is all of Abraham Lincoln’s letters. I have 101 Greatest Poems of All Time. Right now, I’ve decided that I’m going to go back and read some of the great novels that I tell myself, “Well, you read those in college,” but I was a boy 40 years ago. I’ve just started rereading Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.