The Man From Lubbock

John Kim rested his elbow on the jury box as he turned to a witness in a high-level business dispute. “I want you to explain this to me,” he began, “because I’m just a simple man from”—

He stopped and motioned to the jurors.

“Lubbock,” they answered as one.

During the trial, which took place in Harris County about 10 years ago, Kim had repeated that line a half-dozen times. First would come highbrow testimony from a brainy accountant or an executive. Then Kim, an unimposing man in kaleidoscopic loafers and no socks, would approach the stand and say the line.

The moment left Houston attorney Pete Patterson, who was co-counsel on the case, speechless. “They finished his sentence!” he says, shaking his head. “Oh, my god. Talk about having them eat out of your hands. … There’s no way I or anyone else could pull that off.”

“I always mention Lubbock,” says Kim, 63, seated in his modest central Houston office on a spring day, pink sport coat draped over a nearby chair.  “I’m proud of Lubbock.” He gives a growl of a chuckle at the memory of that case—which he won. Kim’s penchant for using his favorite phrase once prompted opposing counsel to file a motion in limine saying he couldn’t use it. He reluctantly agreed.

Those West Texas roots figure prominently in his oversized courtroom persona, which involves a plainspoken approach, sharp cross-examination skills, a unique sense of style, and a knack for tactical theatre.

“In the end, the jury needs to see you as one of them, someone they would want to hire if they were in trouble,” says Kim, whose voice bears a slight Texas drawl. There’s an avuncular sparkle in his eyes.

In the courtroom, Kim’s appearance is unconventional. His closet holds a rainbow of sport jackets. “I don’t believe in the navy blue blazer,” he says. “I’ll wear them occasionally, but I’m liable to have white pants on.”

On this spring day, Kim wears loafers reminiscent of a Navajo rug. Denise Kim, his law partner and wife of 10 years, mentions that a judge in a recent trial asked John to stand before the jury every morning to model that day’s shoes.

“It was like, ‘Mr. Kim, come show the jury your shoes today,’” she says. “And they’d all get up and look. It was classic John.”

Sometimes, the fashion choices are strategic. During voir dire in one case, after an opposing lawyer’s reputation for skipping out on lunch checks came to light, Kim told the prospective jurors that, in his circle, such people were known as penguins. “Because those flippers aren’t long enough to reach the back pocket.” On the day the subsequent trial reached final argument, he purposely wore a penguin-patterned tie.

“Jurors just love him,” says retired Texas District Judge Elizabeth Ray, who now works as an arbitrator. “A lot of lawyers attach themselves to the podium, but John wanders all over the courtroom. Juries get bored, and they like things that keep their attention, like people who are colorful and use charts and visuals, and I think John has figured that out.”

Jerry Young, general counsel for Houston’s Mustang Cat, a heavy equipment and power generation supplier, says many trial lawyers refrain from courtroom humor for fear it will perturb
the judge. But Kim, he says, “knows where that boundary line is, even if it’s something that moves.”

Just as effective as Kim’s sense of humor, Young says, are his cross-examination skills. He has known Kim since law school, and remembers a South Texas case in which Kim so thoroughly discombobulated an expert neurologist that the man, once excused, attempted to leave the second-floor courtroom through the door leading to the judge’s chambers.

“The judge looked at the jury and goes, ‘I don’t think he knows there’s no way out,’” Young recalls. “Then John goes, ‘Well, there’s always the window.’ And the courtroom just lost it. Everyone knew that was a possibility, because that guy didn’t want to walk through the courtroom again.”

Kim agrees that humor is a lawyer’s best weapon, but notes it can’t be allowed to minimize the gravity of the situation. Knowing when and where to apply it, he says, is crucial.

Case in point: He and Denise, a former prosecutor for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, met while working on a mutual oil and gas royalty case. Just after they married, their planned honeymoon getaway was put in jeopardy when opposing counsel in a case wouldn’t agree to a continuance.

Consequently, “we had to have this hearing with this really serious judge,” he says, “and at some point I said, ‘My new bride will kill me if I don’t go on this honeymoon.’ Then I asked the court reporter for an exhibit sticker and put it on Denise’s forehead and said, ‘I’d like to submit her as evidence to the registry of the court.’ Game over.”

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Kim was born in Seattle to first-generation Korean American parents, educators who relocated to Lubbock for tenure-track positions at Texas Tech University. He and his younger brother and sister were still in elementary school when an F5 tornado struck the West Texas city on May 11, 1970, killing 26 people and causing $135 million in damage, the costliest tornado in U.S. history at the time. The family lost their fence and part of their roof but escaped the devastation that leveled many parts of town.

“We were in two bathrooms in two bathtubs with mattresses over us, listening to transistor radios for weather updates,” Kim recalls.

While the family was among Lubbock’s few Asian households, Kim recalls his childhood there as idyllic and welcoming, filled with baseball and basketball games and free of the prejudice he believes his parents experienced in their professional lives. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned an international business degree despite devoting much of his time, he says, to happy hours and playing pickup hoops and poker.

“I’ve been lucky,” he says. “By the grace of whatever, things have just kind of fallen in place for me.”

During his senior year, a chance happy hour meeting with the owner of a real estate development firm led to a post-graduation business career that lasted six years. But as the company faltered during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kim realized he’d better change course.

Considering he’d been an accomplished debater in high school, pursuing law “was always the default,” he says. But it was the words of his mother, Kim’s hero, that ultimately made the difference. “She said, ‘You should do this. You’re a natural, and you will help people,’” he says.

At the South Texas College of Law in Houston, Kim became a national moot court champion and earned his law degree in 1992. He skipped offers from larger firms to take a role with boutique personal injury firm Fisher, Gallagher, Perrin & Lewis, because it would immediately place him where he most wanted to be: in the courtroom.

He was taken under the wing of Mike Gallagher, whom Kim describes as “like a second father to me.” Kim was nearly 30, and as the new guy at the firm, he got the cases no one else wanted and was left to sink or swim. “He handed me cases and said, ‘Go do them,’” Kim says. “It was phenomenal. But by the same token, from day one, he also included me in substantial litigation across the board.”

A self-described “courthouse gym rat” who often dropped into other courtrooms to observe trial attorneys in his spare time, Kim says no one ever made the impression on him that Gallagher did.

“To this day, the only guy who made me sit there and say, ‘Man, that’s magic—I’m not sure I can do that’ is Mike Gallagher,” says Kim. “He’s so real. He is true to himself. And that’s what he ingrained in me.”

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Kim says litigation is a good fit for his competitive personality.

“In litigation and in trials, there’s a winner and a loser,” he says. “The judge is calling balls and strikes. The jury is giving you a win or a loss. It satisfied that part of my ethos.”

In 2003, he launched his own firm, The Kim Law Firm. His work over the years has included products liability, pharmaceutical injury, large construction EPC cases, antitrust and energy litigation cases. He doesn’t take a case unless he’s emotionally invested in it, he says.

“As long as I believe in the position, I can argue it,” he says. “So I may not take the quantity of cases that other people take, but I live it. It’s personal.”

Patterson, who has shared an office with Kim for 12 years, knows that firsthand. He’s known Kim since the late 1990s, when the two worked in the same offices in a downtown Houston high-rise. At one point, Patterson took on a difficult case representing a poor Houston family whose two children had died in a fire; the suit charged the city with negligence when a fire department pumper truck malfunctioned as firefighters worked to put out the blaze.

Because Texas cities and counties enjoy strong immunity against lawsuits, Patterson knew it would be difficult to handle the case alone. All the lawyers he approached begged off. “But John and I talked about the case, and he said, ‘Hell, yeah–let’s go get ‘em.’”

They won a seven-figure verdict, and the city would go on to spend $27 million on new fire equipment for use in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

Patterson and Kim became good friends in the process.

“He’s wicked smart and has a savant-like memory,” Patterson says. “He can relate to the normal Joe. He doesn’t speak above people. That’s something he taught me. He’s a real proponent of being true to your personality.”

Chomping on cigars used to be among Kim’s signature traits, but he gave them up cold turkey as a deathbed promise to his brother, who died of cancer at age 54.

Kim has been extensively involved with the American Board of Trial Advocates Foundation, which works to preserve the jury system and improve trial lawyers’ skills. Kim was president of the group’s national foundation in 2021 and has presided over its Houston chapter. He worries too many young lawyers are rising too fast without trial experience—unacquainted with managing a courtroom, handling juries or even collecting depositions.

“Trial is art,” Kim says. “Trial is persuasion. Trial is theater. You’ve got to understand the process so that when you’re in a courtroom you’re not thinking about rules and processes. You’re present.”

Kim’s everyman sensibilities also imbue the promotional animated videos on his firm’s website, painting Kim as your friendly neighborhood lawyer.  He says his favorite kind of case is the David vs. Goliath variety. “I don’t like bullies,” Kim says, sharing how he and Denise sat at counsel table in one recent case and eyed their opposition.

“There were 19 lawyers and 31 people total on the other side of the courtroom,” he says. “And we wouldn’t let them sit on our side. That’s the kind of case I love.”

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Cabbage and Golf

When preparing for trial, John Kim goes into full work mode. “I’m no fun to be around,” he says. “You can’t [let yourself] be out-prepared. You can’t be out-researched.”

Nor out-cabbaged. Eating the green veggie is one of his pretrial rituals. “To me, cabbage is good luck,” he says. “All forms of cabbage—steamed cabbage, kimchi. Cabbage to my mother meant money. It’s a family thing.

“I also have to play a round of golf just before we start trial, to free my mind,” he continues. “Which is probably just an excuse to feed my golf addiction.”

Kim has been a golf enthusiast since college. He and Denise belong to golf clubs in Houston and on the East Coast, where they have a second home. Kim’s quirky fashion sense also imbues his golf game. He has been known to hit the course with an orange club bag and green golf gloves. Currently, he’s partial to white pants—he owns more than 40 pairs.

“I also like to have something pink on, whether it be my shoes, socks, shorts or shirt,” he says.

“Or all,” wife Denise says.

“Or all,” Kim echoes. “I could wear a pink shirt every day if someone would let me.”

Kim is rarely without a cocktail on the course—often a vodka and Fresca. “Our club in Cape Cod had never heard of Fresca when we joined 15 years ago,” he says. Now it’s kept in stock for him. And when Kim found a vodka brand that permits custom labeling, the club started keeping on hand a bottle of JK Vodka, complete with Kim’s picture.

Wherever caddies are available, Kim says he has been known to hire two at a time. “There’s one to take my clubs and one to go back and forth and get my drinks,” he says with a chuckle. “Actually, the real reason is, people need to hire caddies. They’re trying to make a living.”