Point of Fact

Daniel Gomez had only been out of law school a few years when his skills were put to the test in one of the most complex cases of his career. He and his colleagues filed a breach of trust lawsuit on behalf of the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims alleging the U.S. government had mismanaged the tribe’s assets, leaving an environmental disaster on the reservation from indiscriminate lead and zinc mining. At one point during discovery, opposing counsel scheduled what seemed like an insurmountable number of depositions scattered across the country. 

But Gomez didn’t back down. “Daniel stepped up to the plate and took on the lion’s share of those depositions,” says lead counsel Nancie Marzulla, an attorney who handles litigation against the United States in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., “which made it possible to meet our discovery schedule without having to ask for an extension, thereby delaying resolution of the case.” Gomez traveled across the U.S., taking on about a dozen depositions.

In late 2019, after seven years of cat-and-mouse games, a settlement was reached for nearly $200 million—$59 million on the legal claims and another $137.5 million for a Congressional reference claim authorized by the U.S. House of Representatives, which Congress has yet to fund. Gomez, of Conner & Winters in Tulsa, is understated in his response. “The fact that it took 20 years and I got to be part of what I still think is a positive result is pretty satisfying.”

Gomez might not talk up his accomplishments, but his peers have no trouble doing so. “Daniel was fantastic to work with,” Marzulla says. “He is smart, nice and hardworking. In a big piece of litigation, having all three of these qualities means that Daniel was a key member of our team. … He has an excellent presence in the courtroom and is well-respected by our clients and the court. What I really liked about working with Daniel is that he always did what he said he was going to do and delivered it when it was needed.”

The soft-spoken Gomez, 42, spends approximately half his time practicing Native American law. In the state’s evolving tribal courts, he has served as lead counsel in many cases, including rare jury trials. Adept at persuading judges and jurors with his thorough, analytical arguments, he works hard to convey the facts in a compelling way.

Steve Ward, the Conner & Winters senior partner who recruited Gomez to assist in the Quapaw Nation matter and was impressed with his hard-working attitude, strategic writing skills and ability to learn quickly, describes his protégé as low-key and calm, both in and out of the office. “Clients like him because he thinks before he speaks,” Ward says. “He is also very cool under fire. I have worked with him in major national litigation and he never gets flustered. He also does not waste time complaining and blowing off steam, like a lot of attorneys. He just gets the job done.”

Gomez grew up in a “massive” extended family in a Hispanic community in Corpus Christi, Texas. With his sights set on a banking career, he worked as a bank teller after studying economics at Oklahoma State University. “The big-time job for me at the time would’ve been working for the Federal Reserve in Kansas City or Dallas,” he says.  

But a single business law course piqued his interest, so he took a few more law classes, including those focusing on U.S. Supreme Court and civil rights cases. “It was something that just made a lot of sense to me,” he says. “I found it fascinating, particularly how judges reasoned and wrote opinions on really important issues and how, kind of dramatically, they can change society.”

Gomez wasn’t seriously considering law school but, just for the heck of it, applied to a few knowing he’d go if he got in. In 2005, he was admitted to Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, where he gravitated toward litigation. “I didn’t know, really, what I was doing, if I’m being perfectly honest,” he says. “I didn’t really even know what transactional lawyers were at the time. So to me, being a lawyer meant being a litigator.”

He was good at it, especially when it came to identifying the critical facts of a case and conveying them in a concise manner. The storytelling aspect appealed to him, too. “It’s not just the facts,” he says. “They need to make logical sense, whether you’re talking to a judge or a jury or even the public. It’s just the way my mind works.

“I always want to be right about things,” he adds. “You know these people who always have to point out even if you’re a little bit off? They kind of interject and say, ‘Well, that’s mostly right, but here’s the true story,’ or ‘Here’s a little extra flavor.’ Those are things that I think have always been part of my personality.”

Conner & Winters was a good fit from the start. Gomez and his family had transferred to the Tulsa area when he was in middle school for his dad’s job. What’s more, his wife’s family lived in Oklahoma City. But something else influenced his decision to stay in Oklahoma after law school. While interviewing in Dallas, he says, “The feeling was just very high-stress and competitive. Right off the bat, I could tell the difference in attitudes and style between the big firms in Dallas and what’s considered a big firm in Oklahoma. I got the feeling that a law firm in Oklahoma was going to be more my style.” 

His first trial, held in small claims court, showed him he’d chosen the right profession. Prepared to defend his client, a charity whose van had gotten into a fender bender with a driver while transporting children with disabilities, Gomez showed up, overdressed in his coat and tie, toting his civil procedure manual and ready to make his case by the book. More than once, the plaintiff rambled incessantly on the stand despite Gomez’s objections and the judge’s obvious disapproval. “At one point, the judge finally looked at me and kind of shakes her head that we were on the same page,” Gomez recalls. 

When the plaintiff finally finished his rant, the judge said, “I just wanted to let you know, sir, that the attorney on the other side is correct. None of what you’re saying is admissible testimony.” The court ruled in Gomez’s favor.

More than 15 years later, Gomez prides himself on his laid-back demeanor that keeps him on track in the courtroom. “I think it’s pretty ineffective to be blustery and angry and rude, but there are times when, if you’re cross-examining a witness and they are being hostile, you have to be really firm,” he says. “I don’t recall ever being told by a judge to calm down.”

He knew very little about Native American law when he started in 2008, but it soon constituted about 80% of his practice. “It was a huge learning curve,” he says. “As far as I know, there’s still not an Indian law class at Southern Methodist University because there are not many recognized tribes in the entire state of Texas.” Thanks to a lifelong interest in history, however, the cultural similarities between his Hispanic upbringing and Oklahoma’s Native American culture quickly hit home. 

Gomez was surprised to learn just how diversified the state’s tribes had become in their business pursuits. “I am a little sensitive when I hear talk about how the Indian people in the tribes are all wealthy, because—across the board—that’s not true, but also that it’s all gaming. It’s not just gaming.”

The Quapaw claim may have paid off in a bigger way, at least monetarily, but the Native American case that elicits the most questions is centered around the remains of famed athlete Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and the first Native American competitor to win a gold medal in the Olympic Games. Years after Thorpe’s third wife refused to let his body be returned to its native home—as he’d requested before his death in 1953—Gomez took up an existing suit filed under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which allows for redress for those who never got proper burials, on behalf of Thorpe’s two surviving sons. 

“We could never prove that she received any compensation,” Gomez notes. “But we’re pretty sure that she was essentially shopping him around based on his celebrity. She literally had police show up to a Sac and Fox ceremony and remove his casket with him in it and then had him stored in Tulsa for a couple years. But the deal she eventually struck was with two dying mining towns in Pennsylvania that merged and, to this day, is still called the Borough of Jim Thorpe. He’s buried on this kind of roadside monument.”
Gomez argued the case and won, but lost on appeal, he says, “on a very short opinion that, to this day, still gives me heartburn. I just don’t think it’s right, but it did bring a lot of attention to the issue.”

Outside of his firm, Gomez stays busy with local community work—he serves on the Greater Tulsa Area Hispanic/Latinx Affairs Commission and recently took over as president of the Rotary Club of Tulsa and vice president of the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum. He also serves as an adjunct at the University of Tulsa College of Law, though he is currently taking a break. He accepted the role in 2020 when asked to teach a course in Native American cultural and intellectual property “from the 30,000-foot view” and seized the opportunity to broaden his own knowledge of Native American law.

His pro bono work has, over the years, encompassed religious freedom with the Native American Rights Fund and civil rights and immigration cases in conjunction with the University of Tulsa College of Law’s immigration legal clinic. He’d never handled an immigration case when the clinic’s then-director asked Gomez to represent a Guatemalan refugee. With her husband away in the U.S., working and sending money back to his family, the woman had been raped and tortured in front of her children. She had later escaped to America and was facing deportation.  

Law students at the clinic had already tried the full case in immigration court and lost, and it was headed to New Orleans on appeal. “This is probably a loser at the Fifth Circuit,” the clinic’s director warned Gomez. “The facts are as clear as you could probably get, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is one of the more difficult courts to prevail on asylum cases.”

She was right.

“It was very disappointing,” Gomez recalls. “I remember being told that it was a long shot from the beginning, but just learning about how the asylum system works, even in these types of cases, and how these people still face such hostility in the immigration courts, it was pretty eye-opening. I later went back and read our brief, and I’m still really proud of what we wrote there.

“I’m not an immigrant,” he adds. “But I still feel that people who come here with good intentions to work and feed their families and escape bad situations are just treated so poorly, and that bothers me. I was able to at least make that attempt back then. That’s why this particular issue is meaningful to me.”