On the 10th Anniversary of the BP Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Mikal Watts joins us to discuss a disaster that changed his life. He discusses his path working on some of the biggest cases in American history to becoming the target of a massive federal indictment. Against all advice, Mikal defended himself and beat the charges. Listen to his incredible stories.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: [unintelligible 00:00:02] Welcome to the Alamo Hour. This is Episode 11 and I've got Mikal Watts on the podcast today. Mikal is a trial lawyer over the past 25 or so years, I'm guessing now, Mikal.

Mikal: More like 30.

Justin Hill: 30. Well, you got out early. Mikal's been at the forefront in many areas of litigation on a national stage for Firestone. All the stuff you see on TV. Have you been hurt by this drug? He's been involved in a lot of those. He's really been one of the few players on a national level for a long time regarding a lot of national torts. For our city, that means a lot of things. We've got one of the biggest lawyers in America here, officing here with us protecting our rights and I wanted to get him on here to talk about a few things.

It's really important timing and I bugged him about the important timing. Atlantic monthly just did an article on Mikal. It's a 10-year anniversary of the BP blow out, which we're going to get into this, but that had so many implications on you as a human, you as a lawyer and everything else. We're going to talk about that but I wanted to get you on here to talk about being a lawyer on some of the biggest stages, to talk about being indicted by the feds, talk about what you learned in those scenarios and then what you're doing now. I always start these, a little color commentary. I didn't prompt you on this, but it's a little top 10 list I like to go through and get some of your feelings and views on San Antonio. Okay?

Mikal: All right.

Justin Hill: Thank you for being here.

Mikal: Sure.

Justin Hill: I also want to throw in, the reason I live in San Antonio is Mikal Watts. I cold called him coming out of law school and said I want a job and he gave me a job and said which city? He had six offices and I said, "You pick." He picks San Antonio so you're the reason I live here.

Mikal: Well, with a haircut like mine where you're completely bald, I needed some lawyers without here and you had a pretty good resume but man, what a great lawyer.

Justin Hill: You have matching hair now though.

Mikal: Exactly.

Justin Hill: You used to have a little.

Mikal: All I can do is just grew up the beard now and be Justin.

Justin Hill: All right. How long have you lived in San Antonio?

Mikal: Moved here in 2006 so I'm going on 15 years, 14 years.

Justin Hill: All right. I moved here in '07 and you had just moved here, you and your wife and kids and set up shop. Right now, we're in sort of COVID-19 shutdown, so it's a funny question but at our house right now, we're doing our best to support local and help some of our small businesses and help some of our small restaurants. What restaurants are you reaching out to try to help?

Mikal: It's really not restaurants. It's an epic joke in my law firm that we go to Papa Nacho's in Leon Springs four times a week because I like the margaritas and so I'm just terrified that they're going to shut down. I have lunch there every day.

Justin Hill: Are they open?

Mikal: They are open for takeout and we go in there and I ordered the same Chicken Diablo and [unintelligible 00:03:03] and soda and Frank orders some Papa Nacho's salad and a [unintelligible 00:03:09].

Justin Hill: They have margaritas to go.

Mikal: They do.

Justin Hill: Well, thanks for not bringing a jug of them down here.

Mikal: I've got many political differences with Greg Abbott, but the most brilliant thing he's ever done is when he said, "We're going to shut down, but we're going to let restaurants do their deal and by the way, you can take alcohol home from them." I was like, "We're in."

Justin Hill: That's just a mess. There's so many laws they got to jump through and they're just everybody's ignoring it, which I appreciate. I ask everybody this question. I think it's a fun question. You've got people that come to town and they say, "I'm new to San Antonio, [unintelligible 00:03:41] the river walk in the Alamo." Then I always say there's the PhD tourist places. The, hey, you've done all that, you really got to go see these hidden gems in San Antonio. For me, it's the Japanese tea garden, the rest of the missions, the Botanical garden. Those are some of those things, "Okay. You've done all the other stuff. You go check these things out." What are your hidden gems that you tell people, “Go check these things out?"

Mikal: When we moved to San Antonio, there's nothing more fun than going to have a lunch coma at some of the famous touristy spots.

Justin Hill: Sure. Mi Tierra.

Mikal: Mi Tierra. Literally we would come down here and my wife we'd get a hotel room downtown and stay on the river walk. I think we were vacationing and literally, we'd go in and have lunch and a couple of too many margaritas and sleep the afternoon away. We nicknamed it the lunch coma. I love that. I like hanging out at the Pearl. I think it's pretty cool. Then I think some of the restaurants. Some of the museums that we've got I think The Witte is a cool place to hang around.

Justin Hill: Underrated.

Mikal: Yes. I like take kids there. That's fun. Then I spent a lot of time outside the dominion where I live and so a lot of stuff at 1604 [inaudible 00:04:53] stuff in the room and then when you out there, frankly as you go West, Hill Country gets really cool in a hurry.

Justin Hill: I heard the Hill Country was Kerrville and then somebody finally took me to Rock Springs and I thought, "Wow, this is just so different."

Mikal: It's pretty funny. A couple of years ago, I'm working on these California fire cases, and an entire town burned down in 2018 and so we set up an office there to go help these people out. There was no housing and there was nowhere for my staff to stay so I bought a travel trailer. We moved it out there and of course like a dumb ass, I paid $85,000 for this travel trailer thinking everybody would live there, but there was nowhere to hook it into. There was no sewage, no electricity so it was a waste but my son has taken it over and he's in college right now, but he's living in this travel trailer.

I said, "Brandon, where are you going to stay?" He goes to, "All the travel trailers are picked out." Nothing in San Antonio and not even in Boerne so he finds this place way on the other side of Boerne and I go visit him. Real nice place, a bunch of winter Texans up there but it happens to be in Welfare up on the hill, to which my joke to Brandon, this is great, I've got a son living on welfare. It's a cool spot out there.

Justin Hill: Welfare right next to comfort, which has been fun for me.

Mikal: You've Popos one of the most fattening excellent restaurants. That's one of the special spots in San Antonio as well.

Justin Hill: I've never been to Papa Nachos either. I don't know if I'll get there in [crosstalk].

Mikal: [unintelligible 00:06:19] in Papa Nachos, the chicken fried steak at Popos, you're living large.

Justin Hill: I asked you this when I was a baby lawyer and I remember your answer, I want to ask you now. Who's the best lawyer you ever saw in trial that made you think just, wow, you're good?

Mikal: Man. I got to tell you, lots of fabulous trial lawyers hit big verdicts like that, but I think the best lawyer I've ever seen is Rusty Hardin.

Justin Hill: That's a new answer.

Mikal: Yes. My daughter, when I was going through the criminal indictment that we're going to talk about, she had a friend named Eugenio Duran, who's a kid that has clerked for me here and great friend of the family and he was tight with the Clemens boys who both played baseball at the University of Texas. One of the Clemens boys, Casey reached out to Eugenio and said, "Hey I heard what's happening to your dad. I'm the only person in America that knows what you're about to go through." They became our dear friends and they watched out for my daughter and [unintelligible 00:07:16]. The Clemens boys, I would charge through a wall for them. I think they're wonderful.

In that sense, I got to know Rusty Hardin. I think the whole world thought that Roger Clemens was crazy testifying the way that he did and that maybe he was in trouble and then one great trial lawyer and one great cross-examination completely shredded that prosecution for the farce that it was.

Justin Hill: Sure.

Mikal: I think Rusty Hardin is as good as it gets.

Justin Hill: A good friend of mine, Derek Hollingsworth, did a lot of the work on that case too. I got some of the inside track, but yes, Rusty, you have not taken up his fancy suits though.

Mikal: No. I'm not really a fancy suits kind of guy, but I'm suing Princess Cruises line over this COVID-19 thing and I've got a bunch of cases and Rusty just signed up one of the death cases and he calls me out of the blue. Of course, I just remember the exhilaration of knowing that I'm going to get to work up a case with Rusty Hardin. That's the fun thing about what I do is working up cases with great lawyers. I don't consider that a measuring stick of who's better, who's this or that but getting to work with great warriors is a thrill, and Rusty is certainly one.

Justin Hill: I will say that about you, I'm not going to say, no ego, you've got an incredible success, but you are always very happy to work with other lawyers and learn from them and I've tried to implement that in my life.

Mikal: That's why they call it practicing law. All we do is plagiarize and rip off other people's techniques.

Justin Hill: Hopefully, we can let them do it for us if we got something on us.

Mikal: I'm 30 years in and I'm still learning.

Justin Hill: Even now when I reach out to your friend Mikal, everybody helps me with whatever I need.

Mikal: Of course, they better.

Justin Hill: I know too much about you as opposed to some of my guests but things I want to ask you, this is mine, I'm going to be selfish. How does faith guide your work as an attorney and a trial lawyer? You're very faithful man and we are an industry that is too often put in a pigeonhole of being greedy or just crappy people generally is how people try to portray us. How does faith guide you? How does it affect your motivations and what do you think are the most important things that help you get through day to day as a trial lawyer with your faith?

Mikal: When I got married, I really lacked faith, but I married a woman who is incredibly faithful and my wife runs a prayer ministry for folks that have been put through trauma, I'm going to put it politely, and she steered me that way. In 1995 at Promise Keepers Rally at the Texas Stadium in Dallas where the Cowboys play accepted Jesus Christ, my Lord, and savior. It's an important part of my life. I don't judge people and I don't impose my faith on other people, but I do believe in a certain ethos. You don't cheat on your wife, you don't cheat on your partners, you don't steal, you don't lie, try to be honest. Then the other thing I would say is to who much is given, much is expected. Both back in 2008, and again this quarter. We got a lot of people here in San Antonio that are hurting through no fault of their own. I will never forget after Lehman brothers fell off in 2008, just looking at the guys that were begging on the street corners. They looked like me and you Justin. They were guys with families and kids who lost their jobs through- in that case, a bunch of criminal activity from bankers, in this case, because of a virus. I think we all as citizens of San Antonio, our first and highest obligation is to our fellow citizens. I don't know whether you saw it, but a few weeks ago Express-News had that picture of thousands of cars [crosstalk] San Antonio food bank and I've never been more motivated by a picture in my life, and so I've tried to cause all the trial lawyers to step up and to help. There were people right here in our community through no fault of their own that are going to go hungry, they're going to run out of money, they're going to run out of food, and we got to help them. That's not necessarily faith led although it's certainly indicative of what the gospel teaches us. It's damn sure something we ought to be doing.

Justin Hill: Sure. The moral compass. Whether it's faith or inherent. It's all part of [unintelligible 00:11:41].

Mikal: There's a bunch of people particularly on the south side of this town, on the east side of this town that are going to get harder, get hit harder by this thing than I am. I think you're an absolute jackass if you can't look 10 miles away and see that people are hungry, and try to do something about it.

Justin Hill: I think everybody appreciated that you made a very large donation at the food bank. We've tried to help as we can, and we're helping with giving refurbished laptops to a GED program. It transcends all things not just food. People need to be educated, and people need to be able to have something when this ends which I'm very optimistic it's going to end. [unintelligible 00:12:20] people said it's not going to end. [crosstalk]

Mikal: Of course, it's going to end at some day, but I'm really worried that A, that we're reopening to soon and we're going to have a second phase. I'm a big history buff, and I believe that we study history to avoid the mistakes of the past. If you look at what happened in 1918 with what they call the Spanish flu, which by the way didn't originate from Spain.

Justin Hill: It started in Kansas. [chuckles]

Mikal: Yes, it did start in Kansas with the United States military. The bottom line is all the military powers of World War 1 had censorship rules, so you couldn't write about anything that would reflect poorly on the military. Spain was neutral in World War 1, so its doctors were the only ones writing about the flu that was ravaging everybody, so it was nicknamed the Spanish flu. The point that I was making is, is that in the spring of 1918, of course it was a bad flu. It didn't kill everybody, but it's highly infectious, and then it mutated. Everybody took it easy, it mutated, and then by the fall when flu season started. It killed 150,000 Americans in one month. I'm very concerned that in the name of reopening the economy for either presidential aspirations, or for just economic good intentions that we're going to create a second round of this in the fall that's going to be far more damaging.

Justin Hill: I think everybody's in agreement that there is going to be multiple rounds of this. It's just how well can we manage it.

Mikal: It doesn't have to be. We got to do the right thing. I'm a huge fan of the mayor, but I personally-- I don't lobby the mayor very often. I remember about six weeks before fiesta, he still hadn't called it, and he didn't want to call it. I called him up and I said, "Mayor, you cannot take this chance." I said, "If you create this huge pandemic of people dying of coronavirus because we wanted to watch a bunch of people in a parade?" All you got to do is look what happened New Orleans. I was in New Orleans. I was supposed to try a case in early March, and I was in New Orleans the week before Mardi Gras and it had one case in the entire state. Then some dumb ass made the decision to hold Mardi Gras, and now they're the third or fourth largest state, and it's all because of that event. These people that say God will protect us and everything's great. God gives us free will, and we can make smart decisions or stupid decisions. I encourage everybody here in San Antonio and elsewhere, let's be smart about this. Let's wear the masks, let's stay isolated to the extent we can, and learn about Zoom so that you're not psychological isolated. Talk to people over the computer, but do not put yourself in a position where you're spreading this virus because you're not only affecting yourself, you're affecting all your neighbors, and your friends, and your loved ones. My biggest problem is I have a 22-year-old son that thinks he's bulletproof same way you and I did. If he goes and gets infected and brings it back around my mother who's 73. That's not good.

Justin Hill: Knock on wood, San Antonio's kept a lid on it a little bit so far, and I hope that keeps up. I had an epidemiologist on air, and she talked about the warm and cold, and does that affect. She...