As a young adult, Dr. Hieu T. Dang had an inkling he wanted to become both a lawyer and a doctor. Rather than choose one career over the other, he is both.
Dang, who joined the Sorrels Law firm in December, is opening its Dallas office Friday. The firm will be located at 8111 Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway, Suite 790. Dang works on the firm’s medical malpractice, catastrophic injury and wrongful death teams.
Dang will continue to practice anesthesiology. He also maintains a personal practice in which he represents physicians on transactional matters and issues before the Texas Medical Board.
The Sorrels firm’s focus on representing victims of accidents and medical errors drew Dang to the firm, he said.
Dang gets special fulfillment from translating medical jargon to patients and helping them understand important matters of their health and medical treatment. He believes communication is an area that needs improvement in the healthcare system, and he realized with his dual experience he can be an advocate for change.
“I’ve been told that I’m a good teacher,” Dang said, “that I can break things down to people in a language that they understand, and I think that kind of goes hand-in-hand with being a good litigator — being able to explain it to our jury and make them fully understand what you’re trying to communicate to them.”
Speaking of languages, Dang speaks four: English, Vietnamese, Spanish and French. He’s also studied Mandarin.
Dang credits his childhood for much of his success. Being the youngest of six children in a Vietnamese family motivated him to be ambitious and stand out, he said.
His parents owned a convenience store before moving to the U.S. His mother now lives in Houston (his father passed away 14 years ago), and Dang considers himself “a dual citizen of Houston and Dallas.”
After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, Dang worked for Locke, Liddell & Sapp (now Locke Lord). From there, Dang went to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School for his medical degree. He completed an anesthesiologist residency at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital. He was previously the director of anesthesia and vice chairman of the surgery department at East Houston Regional Medical Center, which closed after sustaining damage from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. In 2019, Dang moved to Dallas for an anesthesia position.
Dang is board certified by the American Board of Anesthesia and is licensed to practice law in front of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Randy Sorrels, a partner at the firm, said he was drawn to Dang’s “insatiable desire to learn and grow.”
“Dr. Dang brings unique expertise to our law firm with his academic success, Big Law experience, and his practice as a board-certified anesthesiologist,” Sorrels said.
In a Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, below, Dang explains how he juggles his workload and what has led him to this point in his career.
Why did you decide that Sorrels Law firm was best for your practice right now?
[Randy Sorrels] has a very strong reputation in the legal community, and I like the fact that his focus is on representing victims of accidents and medical mishaps. With my background in law and medicine, I thought that my background would be able to provide a lot of value to him, and his firm would be able to help me utilize my knowledge and experiences to the maximum.
How do you have the time to juggle your careers?
Randy’s firm has given me the flexibility to continue practicing medicine. That’s number one. Number two, currently, there are a lot of opportunities in the field of anesthesia to do part-time work. So that’s what I’m doing and there’s a shortage of anesthesiologists in the country. So there are various opportunities for me to do that. I found a position on the anesthesia side that also gives me the flexibility to continue my legal work. Not only do I do medical malpractice and personal injury work with Sorrels Law firm, I actually have my own personal practice where I represent physicians on transactional matters and issues before the Texas Medical Board. So I’m kind of on both sides of the legal spectrum.
How do you juggle it all? What are your keys to success?
One is having a very good calendaring system. Two is making sure that I don’t bite off more than I can chew. And three is knowing when to ask for help from other people. I’ve always been a very organized person and able to compartmentalize things, and one thing that people always tell me is that I’m always thinking about being efficient. I’m very efficiency oriented in everything that I do, so I’m able to streamline my daily life and all the tasks that I do for these various projects.
I want to ask you about undergraduate school, or perhaps even before undergrad, what was your career goal?
So I kind of had a feeling that I wanted to do both. And I’ll say it that way, because who, at the age of 18 or 19 or 20 says, “I want to be both”? You can think that you like one or the other or you like both, but who says that they want to do both? But I did like both areas at the time. When I actually entered college, my focus was on becoming a lawyer. But I also took a lot of science classes and took all of the pre-med requirements, and I liked those as well. I also liked the idea of attending to people, being a physician to people. So I took the MCAT right around the same time I took the LSAT. I did fairly well on both, and at the time — since I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I wanted to go into medicine, which I knew would require a very long-term commitment — I went to law school.
And so I got out of law school, practiced law for a large law firm in Houston, and I enjoyed it. But I also realized that this isn’t what I wanted to do for the next 40-plus years of my life. … I am the type who has a lot of varied interests, and for a long time, honestly, I kind of thought that maybe that meant I had some kind of issue with my attention or having some kind of attention deficit. But then I realized that that’s really not the case. I am able to devote all of my concentration and energy to one thing, and I just have a lot of different interests and like to devote energy and interest to different things. I realized that that’s actually an asset. After practicing law for a couple of years, I realized that my MCAT score was about to expire. And so I came to kind of a crossroads and had to decide: “Do I apply to medical school? Or do I just let the MCAT score expire and … go down the legal path for the rest of my life.” I told myself I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t at least try to apply to medical school and see what happened there. So I applied and got accepted to UT Southwestern, which is one of the top medical schools in the state. And then came the next decision, whether I was going to attend.
It was a similar type of thinking that I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t go to med school and take advantage of that opportunity. So I did and became an anesthesiologist and everything worked out. I’m very happy that I did that.
I’ve been practicing medicine for years because I finished residency in 2011. And suddenly, a couple of years ago, I started dabbling in legal work, mainly because various people were asking me to help them on different matters. Initially, I was representing physicians on transactional matters and, I’m not trying to boast, but every single one of them told me I just talked differently to them than other lawyers ever have. I think it was because I understood what their daily lives were like … not just on an emotional level, but understanding how things work at the hospital, how things work administratively, how things work with other physicians and all the different demands that are placed on the physician’s time, not just the clinical demands. That made me understand that I really have something valuable to provide. So I was exploring how to expand my legal career even further. … I contacted Randy and he immediately returned my email. … It worked out very well. … It’s been a great collaboration, it’s been a great experience for me. I’ve learned a lot and I think I’ve been able to provide some value to him and the other attorneys in the firm.
What else am I not asking you about your practice that I ought to be?
My overall plan for my career is to really help people on all sides understand our healthcare system. It’s nothing earth-shattering to say that there are a lot of flaws in our healthcare system. There are a lot of ways in which it can improve. I think we have a great system of healthcare. I have a tremendous amount of respect for physicians and for our hospital system, but there are a lot of ways in which things can be improved. Going through my medical training, I often felt various frustrations with how things worked. I always wondered why people didn’t speak up to try to improve things. Once I reached a certain point in my career, I realized I’m in a prime position to do what I’ve always wanted other people to do. So that’s a big reason why I decided to try to expand my legal career.
Are you willing to share a couple of those things that can be improved?
I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in terms of communicating to patients what is going on with their healthcare, what their treatments are and how their treatments are working. I’ve noticed a lot of times that patients are told to undergo a certain treatment or procedure and what’s used is a medical term. A lot of times they don’t understand what that means and it’s not explained to them. Because I’m on the medical side, I understand it because these are words that are just part and parcel of our everyday language. But to these people, these are foreign terms. It’s sometimes forgotten that the patient may not understand what the term is.
I had a patient come in and I had to explain to him that he had to be intubated. He was told, “You have to come in for this specific procedure to be intubated.” The average patient can have this procedure outside the hospital, but he had to come into the hospital because he needed to be intubated. And so I had to explain to him, number one, what intubation meant — mechanically how it works. And then number two, why it was necessary for him, and I actually got out what is called an endotracheal tube — the tube that we place — and I showed him the tube. I showed him the different parts of the tube and explained to him how it worked. I could see the light bulb go off in his eyes and his wife’s eyes. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, no one’s ever explained it to us like that.” I do [enjoy that part]. I’ve been told that I’m a good teacher, that I can break things down to people in a language that they understand. And I think that kind of goes hand-in-hand with being a good litigator, being able to explain it to our jury and make them fully understand what you’re trying to communicate to them.
This Q&A was condensed for clarity.