Big Swings

In 1993, when Billy Corbello asked his cousin Michael Veron to do battle with Shell Oil, Veron was initially reluctant but found he couldn’t say no. For starters, he loved his cousin like a brother. And Corbello hammered home the fact that Veron’s own father, also a lawyer, had asked Corbello to keep an eye on the family’s land, while Shell had not only failed to vacate the family’s Louisiana farm when the royalty-based lease expired, but also neglected to clean up the toxic waste left behind, as stipulated in the decades-old contract. So there was only one choice.

“I took it on,” recalls Veron, 74, co-founder of Veron Bice in Lake Charles. He adds, half-jokingly, “Fools rush in.”

The lawsuit was considered a long shot. But by the time the Supreme Court of Louisiana affirmed the favorable jury verdict 10 years later, the judgment had reached $76 million, including restoration, illegal saltwater disposal, and interest on the original award. To this day, Veron says, Big Oil companies continue to lobby for “anti-Corbello laws, where they’re trying to rewrite the law to eliminate any responsibility for oil fuel pollution. They had not been called to task for it until the Corbello case came up.”

So how did he come out on top? Veron puts it simply. “Shell behaved badly, and I think the jury perceived them as arrogant,” he says. “Their witnesses didn’t do well under cross. They also had a lot of historical documents that were very damning to them. They would say, ‘Technically, the lease doesn’t allow us to do this, but what the landowner doesn’t know won’t hurt him,’ and worse than that.”

He had no idea the case would make such an impact. “I didn’t know what I was doing was supposedly a big deal. I just thought it made sense legally. And it all worked out.”

A commercial litigator who represents both businesses and property owners, the tall, raconteurish trial attorney has snared numerous notable verdicts in close to 50 years of practicing law. After starting as a defense lawyer, the Corbello case “kind of forced me to switch over to the other side,” he says. “Depending on who you talk to, I either came over from the dark side or to the dark side.”

“Mike’s cases have set precedent—not just one case, but multiple cases,” says Veron Bice partner Shayna Sonnier. “The Corbello case is the premiere one regarding land contamination. It changed the landscape in Louisiana.”

She adds: “Mike is brilliant. He grasps legal concepts and theories immediately. He is creative. He can think several steps ahead and, given his experience from both the defense and plaintiff side, he is able to anticipate arguments or strategies of his opponents accurately. … No one underestimates him because they know he will always bring his A game.”

A native of Lake Charles, Veron admits to an “irreverent” attitude as a young boy. “I just couldn’t handle the boredom,” he says. “Some of my primary school teachers found ways to keep me entertained so I wouldn’t disrupt the class. One used to have me grade all of the papers. She’d put me in another room. That kept me occupied.”

In high school, he loved to debate, and he was good at it. He never wanted to be anything but a lawyer, even before his father, Earl, the only one of eight children to attend college, gave up owning a grocery store to open a general law practice. Earl went on to serve as a state judge and was nominated to the federal bench in Lake Charles by President Jimmy Carter.

But his father did influence another lifelong passion: golf. At the Lake Charles Country Club, Earl sometimes shared the secrets to his own precise swing: Drag the club head back as you take it away so that you fully extend. Don’t yank it up close to your body. Don’t be in a hurry to hit the ball; it’s not going to move until you hit it. The younger Veron was later deemed the first plus-handicap player in the history of the club.

Veron had always been a “fair-to-middling” student. “I never really worked very hard. But I always did well on standardized tests,” he says. “My dad would tell me all the time how I was an underachiever.” 

Then came Tulane University Law School. When first-semester grades were revealed, he ranked near the top of the class, and he quickly became one of the school’s most competitive students. “A light switched when I was in my first class or two of law school,” he says. “I realized that I needed to work harder than I’d ever worked.”

In 1976, while nearing the end of his studies at Harvard Law School, he interviewed to join the faculty of LSU. Teaching sounded like a blast, and the dean had pulled some strings. But that weekend, no sooner had he walked in the door at his parents’ house when his dad announced, “Joe Tritico wants to talk to you.”

“Joe Tritico was the guru,” Veron explains. “He was the F. Lee Bailey or the Clarence Darrow of the local bar establishment.”

Tritico’s powers of persuasion dazzled the young attorneys he recruited. By the time Veron left Tritico’s office, he’d not only agreed to come to work for the legal lion he’d grown up admiring, he didn’t even ask how much he’d be paid.

Within six months, Veron was introduced in a packed courthouse, in front of a standing-room-only media entourage, for the arraignment of his first client: Ham Reid, sheriff of Calcasieu Parish. Reid faced more than 15 charges, including an accusation that he made personal use of deputies’ time during work hours. The prosecution’s pick for the first trial, based on a claim that Reid had stolen public money because deputies had helped him research, illustrate and promote his antidrug book, puzzled Veron. “I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘You really think you’re going to get a jury to convict this man of a felony and maybe send him to jail for writing a book telling kids ‘Don’t use drugs’? I’m 26 years old and I’m just scratching my head, going, ‘One of us is missing this totally.’

“Joe had me do half of the closing argument—I had done a lot of the motion work and drafting motions and all that—and it was heavy stuff for me, I’m telling you. I was really hooked after that.” The jury acquitted Reid, the second trial involving a similar matter ended the same way, and the rest of the charges were simply dismissed.

After that, Veron found himself frequently pitted against two men he calls “the two best plaintiffs’ lawyers in this area of the state, Bill Baggett and Raleigh Newman, and they’ll run over you. They were just really aggressive. I picked up bad habits because I thought every case was a death struggle. It didn’t have to be that way.”

He regrets how soon he left Tritico’s office—in 1978. “He didn’t have a firm, so much as he just kind of fed most of us,” Veron says. “I didn’t realize how well I was doing, but for some reason the idea of being in a firm, and the prestige, appealed to me.” At Scofield Bergstedt, he spent 26 years in a defense-heavy practice before co-founding what is now Veron Bice in 2005 and gravitating more and more toward plaintiffs’ work.

One thing he’s never regretted? Focusing on litigation. “It’s a competition,” he says. “There’s a winner and a loser and you know how it comes out.”

In most cases, he has come out on top, no matter the side. Of the 12 cases in which he defended Olin Corporation for damages stemming from the release of toxic phosgene gas at its Lake Charles plant, Veron won 11. In six asbestos death cases across the state, he won five, “which was not easy to do,” he says.

Dueling with the oil and gas industry, he has represented landowners in four main types of cases: contamination, as in Corbello; improperly drilled and operated wells that destroy the reservoirs below the surface; trespassing with pipelines left beyond the time limits of the lease; and coastal land loss caused by digging that exposes freshwater vegetation to saltwater and kills its roots.

“Louisiana has lost land that’s more than the size of the state of Delaware since the 1930s, and it’s getting worse and worse,” Veron says. “We’ve lost whole villages and towns along the coast. People have had to leave. Their land’s sinking away. … Louisiana lacks the political will to enforce [restoration rules] against Big Oil, because Big Oil, wherever it goes, brings all of its lobbyists and money.”

Still, he is proud of the big one that got away. In 2013, he worked with a team on behalf of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority against nearly 100 oil and gas corporations for breaking their contractual obligations to clean up the properties. After the defendants succeeded in moving the case to federal court, “which is not a good place for most plaintiffs,” Veron says, “we lost what The New York Times called ‘the most ambitious lawsuit ever.’ But we’ve done a lot more work, and a lot more of those cases have been successfully retained in state court.”

Early in his career, Veron learned how to communicate with jurors who were nervous about being able to understand the facts. It didn’t hurt that he’d majored in English literature in college, at the insistence of his dad, who told him, “The more you can understand what you read, and the more you can write and speak intelligently, the more successful you’re going to be.”

“There’s a teacher part of me that likes breaking things down so that, question by question, I can peel off the layers of the onion one at a time,” Veron says. “My favorite teachers could explain the subject matter in a way that made me listen and go, ‘Well, that’s obvious.’ I’ve always thought that a lawyer is nothing but a teacher of the judge or jury, and that also goes with written pleadings and briefs. The simpler, the better, and that’s the biggest challenge for lawyers. Lawyers have a bad habit of writing sentences that actually are three sentences in one. So I always tell young lawyers in our firm, ‘Chop it up. Chop it up.’ If you tell your reader something more than once, they’re going to say, ‘I’ve seen that before,’ and they’re going to quit paying attention. And then they’ll miss the next point.”

His way with words also catapulted him to an unlikely claim to fame as “the John Grisham of Golf.” Since the 2000 publication of his first novel, The Greatest Player Who Never Lived: A Golf Story (see sidebar) he’s written five more books, including the nonfiction Shell Game, which chronicles his family’s battle against the oil industry.

He initially gravitated toward fiction, he says, because it’s just fun. “Golf fiction is a very small genre. It’s about an inch wide, but it’s a mile deep.”

A while back, The Greatest Player was optioned to Miramax, although a movie hasn’t materialized quite yet. One of the most enjoyable cases of his career, however, came as a referral from a California attorney who read one of his books. Veron went on to represent a Louisiana-born baseball pitcher who, after blowing his arm out in a game, was notified that Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t pay on his insurance policy.

A fun moment came just before a deposition with the famed Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham. “We’ve got a few minutes before the deposition with the foremost sports orthopedic surgeon in the world, probably, and I want to make sure he knows what I’m interested in having him say,” Veron says. “And he wants to talk about my golf books.”

On the eve of trial, Veron settled the case for much more than the policy limit.

Decades of practice have softened Veron’s once-fiery outlook on life and law. “I’ve improved my spiritual life a lot in the last couple of years, and I try to go to daily mass. I say my prayers about trying to be better, trying to be kinder,” he says. “I’m less intense now than I used to be. It’s taken me years to let my hair down a little bit.”

Teeing Off

In 1998, after hitting it off with high-energy San Francisco attorney and golf author Robert “Bo” Links at a golf conference where they were speaking about legal issues, Michael Veron confided, “I’ve always wanted to write a book, too.”

“Just do it,” Links urged. “No matter if it gets published, write it.”

So he did, penning The Greatest Player Who Never Lived: A Golf Story, a novel about a legal intern who stumbles across a murder case, for two or three hours each evening. “It just poured out of me,” Veron says.

The book deal took a bit longer. After submitting the manuscript without an agent and calling several times to follow up, he politely told the publisher’s secretary of his intentions to send it elsewhere. “We understand,” she said. “But give us another 30 days.”

“Unbeknownst to me, she took the manuscript home that night,” Veron says. “The next morning, she walks into the publisher’s office at Sleeping Bear Press in Michigan, and she throws it on his desk. He’s buried under a pile of manuscripts. And she says, ‘Put everything else aside and read this. It’s a page-turner.’”

To Veron’s surprise, The Greatest Player, which debuted in 2000, met with stellar reviews in The New York Times, Travel + Leisure Golf and other publications. “When you’re a lawyer, you write a briefing. The other side is paying a lawyer to write something that says we’re full of crap and everything we say is wrong. So I’m getting these reviews and I’m going, ‘This is really great.’ The other side [in a lawsuit] is never going to say, ‘Wow, what a great brief, Judge. He’s right.’”