When Haynes Boone Dallas office associates Ashley Koos and Sean Lewis marched into the Harris County Courthouse on Nov. 11 for their first-ever trial, they weren’t flanked with an entourage of senior lawyers and paralegals filling the well.
Armed instead with skills honed during a three-day trial academy in May, the two linked arms as co-first chairs and forged ahead on behalf of their pro bono client, gospel singer and minister Wintley Phipps, to convince a jury that a longtime acquaintance and former business partner had defrauded Phipps.
On Nov. 13, the jury found defendant Vincent W. Beale of The Woodlands liable for fraud and ordered him to pay $308,000 in compensatory damages and $665,000 in punitive damages. A portion of the punitive damages, if recovered, will go to the firm’s pro bono initiatives, firm leaders said.
The associates’ growth over the six months between the trial academy and the courtroom was “astronomical,” said Victor Vital, global chair of Haynes Boone’s trial practice group.
“They were two of the most outstanding graduates from the Trial Academy, but this real-life experience validates what we are doing as a firm from a professional development standpoint,” Vital said. “The outstanding graduates that I saw from the Trial Academy progressed — from a professional development standpoint — light years.”
Catching the Bug
Lewis knew early that he wanted to be a lawyer. His interest in history and politics, and the fact that so many of the public servants he admired held law degrees, shaped his direction. With his parents’ encouragement, he pursued law at Texas Tech University.
Now, he hopes to build a career as a trial lawyer. “I got the bug,” he said.
Koos came to the profession from the opposite direction. After college, she became a teacher and planned to pursue a career in education policy. But after three years in a classroom, she realized she could advocate more effectively as an attorney. She graduated from Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and now wants to focus on white-collar and government investigations.
Both attorneys joined the Dallas office in 2022.
When Vital returned to Haynes Boone in 2024, he pursued a vision for internal trial training that became the firm’s inaugural Trial Academy in late May. Lewis and Koos emerged from the academy as standouts.
“They both had and have a degree of confidence, curiosity and passion that I don’t see very often in young lawyers,” Vital said. “They have all of the earmarks of being really fantastic and seasoned trial lawyers as they progress.”
Vital had previously worked on Phipps’ case while at Barnes and Thornburg, though he did not initially bring the case with him to Haynes Boone. When an associate there later left the firm, Vital was presented with an opportunity to reunite with the case. He consulted with Pro Bono Counsel Rachel Elkin, who coordinates the firm’s pro bono efforts, and the case was assigned to Lewis and Koos in July.
A ‘Chilling’ Fraud Case
The dispute dates back to 2016, when Phipps — thinking ahead to retirement — inquired with Beale, whom he had known for decades, about a potential investment, according to the attorneys. The men belonged to the same college alumni network and had partnered on earlier business ventures, the lawyers said.
Beale invited Phipps to invest in what he described as a compounding pharmacy business, according to the complaint. According to the complaint, Beale represented that he had a contract with a lab in Palm Beach, Florida and that the business would recruit doctors and hospitals to send samples there. He promised to return Phipps’ total capital infusion of $308,000, plus a return, according to the complaint.
But within three months, Beale blew through Phipps’ money, the attorneys said, and about a year after the investment, Beale told Phipps that the business had failed. Attorneys for Beale did not respond to The Lawbook’s request for comment.
Phipps filed a books-and-records lawsuit to determine whether any impropriety occurred. According to the complaint, the documents Beale eventually produced — after a court-imposed deadline — showed only $200,000 of the investment was attributed to Phipps, with the remainder assigned to others, including Beale. The records also showed $202,400 in consulting fees with no supporting documentation, and an alleged $600,000 in annual revenue without evidence of deposits or expenditures.
“Our primary theme was that this was a case about trust and what happens when it’s exploited,” Koos said. “It really was a truly chilling fraud case of someone who went to a friend that he’d known for decades at a really difficult time in his life and he wanted to invest his life savings, he wanted to prepare his family for retirement, and the defendant saw vulnerability and an opportunity to exploit that, and he did.”
A secondary theme, Lewis said, was about following the money.
“We methodically went through every single transaction, and encouraged the jury to use their common sense to know that the transactions they saw in the bank statements did not further this so-called business,” Lewis said.
Lewis called Beale adversely and questioned him for about 80 minutes on direct and another half hour on re-direct. Looking back, Lewis said questioning Beale was his favorite task at trial, as well as the most challenging. Beale was charismatic but also dishonest, Lewis said, and the examination forced him to be nimble and rely on split-second decision-making over what was worth going further on or what was worth moving on from.
“It really required me to understand our theory of the case and have a good grasp of the facts so we could get our point across to the jury,” Lewis said.
Koos said her favorite task was delivering the closing argument — once she got past the nerves. Both sides rested their cases on Nov. 12, but the judge delayed closings until the next morning so jurors could deliberate immediately afterward.
“That whole night, I was sweating,” Koos said.
The next morning, standing in front of a jury and distilling days of testimony into a final, coherent story felt like the culmination of all that they had prepared for, she said.
“You just never know how things are going to play out and how it’s going to sound once people get on the stand,” she said. “So I really liked being able to take everything that had unfolded at trial and try to put it back into a streamlined narrative for the jury.”
Fulfilling a Lawyer’s Creed
Elkin said the case embodies what the firm hopes young lawyers gain through pro bono work.
“It’s obvious that we want to be helping those who can’t otherwise afford legal services or have access to legal services,” Elkin said. “But I think it also goes so much into the skill of guiding someone who’s not familiar with the legal process through the twists and turns of the legal process … I think that’s a specific skill that’s so important to build, and that pro bono is a great way to build with how to speak to your clients, how to console them, how to validate them, but of course, how to fight for them.”
Lewis said he kept returning to the Texas Lawyers’ Creed, which urges lawyers to ensure all people have access to competent representation regardless of wealth. The firm provided Lewis and Koos an opportunity to live out the creed, he said.
“When you’re dealing with businesses, sometimes that’s lost on folks,” Lewis said. “Here we have a person who was wronged, who was dealing with fraud for 10 years by his longtime friend. Ashley and I played a pivotal role and first chair role in administering justice, and I’m so proud to have done that.”