Things That Matter

James E. Payne’s docket includes a significant number of cases involving serious burn injuries. Among the many challenges they present, not least is the sensory issue.

“There’s nothing like that smell,” says Payne. “You have to be strong. You can’t walk into the room—the hospital, the courtroom—and be emotional about it. [The client] is looking to you for strength. There’s absolutely nothing in law school that prepares you for that.”

What did prepare the Beaumont attorney was a childhood accident. At age 10, he suffered injuries and burns to his hand and leg when a faulty picture tube exploded inside his family’s television. Payne was standing near the set and bore the brunt of the explosion. In the emergency room, a doctor told his parents their son might lose his hand.

Payne’s leg eventually healed, and while he did lose half a knuckle, he did not have his hand amputated. A relative put his parents in touch with Beaumont attorney Thomas A. Peterson, at Peterson Petit & Peterson, who represented the family in a suit against a retailer and the TV manufacturer. The case settled, and the family used the money to cover the medical bills.

Peterson was struck by the youngster’s maturity, particularly when it came to grasping the details of his case. “He was involved and interested and polite,” recalls Peterson.  “He was not your normal 11-year-old.”

Peterson stayed in touch with the family, who kept him updated on James’ progress and major milestones. In law school and as a young attorney, Payne sought career advice from Peterson. “I like to have a relationship with my clients and their families, but this was more ongoing than most,” says Peterson. “I just liked him.”

The experience had a profound effect on Payne, who decided to become an attorney and guide others through traumatic experiences. “That unknown: not understanding anything about the legal system,” Payne says. “I get people not understanding the process. My parents didn’t understand it.”

Echoes of that childhood incident have shaped the 57-year-old attorney’s experience as a litigator. He understands the needs of clients who have been severely burned, from the real possibility that they won’t survive a week to the high risk of infection, which can lead to death months after the initial injury. 

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” says Payne. Several years ago, he represented the family of Brian Allen, who died eight months after suffering severe burns while working at a South Carolina paper mill in 2015. The Allen family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and reached a settlement which Payne says was one of the largest single-plaintiff judgments in state history. But it came, Payne said at the time, after “an intense three-year litigation battle” on top of the devastating emotional loss of Allen’s life.

On a Monday morning last spring, Payne was on his way to the airport for a flight to Atlanta, where he and his colleagues had a hearing in a human trafficking matter. These cases are “heating up” as a portion of his docket, he says. A significant amount of his time, however, is focused on nationwide personal injury cases involving members of the United Steelworkers union. 

Dressed in a dark suit jacket and white button-down shirt, Payne reflects on his journey, starting with his childhood.

As a teenager, he attended Port Arthur’s Lincoln High School, a predominantly Black school that nurtured confidence, and that Payne credits with shaping the person he is today. As a high school basketball player and a member of the drama team, Payne says, “My teachers were very adamant that not only were we able to compete on the courts or the fields, we could compete in the classrooms. ” James Gamble, who coached the basketball team, remains a mentor. “My coach taught me life lessons—he still teaches me—that I use today. The coaches and the teachers wanted to make sure that we were competent, that we possessed what we needed to compete at the next level.”

While Payne was an undergraduate majoring in political science at the University of Houston, he set his sights on attending law school and working for Vinson & Elkins. “I did some homework and realized that they actually recruited more students out of the University of Houston than they did out of University of Texas at Austin at the time,” he says. He chose Vinson & Elkins because of its reputation and its variety of litigation. 

By his second year at Vinson & Elkins, Payne was doing well—taking a lot of depositions. “But I wasn’t trying any cases,” he says. 

“And a lot of my contemporaries were trying cases.” Concerned about losing his competitive edge, he met with the late Walter Umphrey in Beaumont. When Payne walked into Umphrey’s office, the older attorney pointed to a couch stacked with files. “He told me, ‘All those files need to be tried, and you’ll try every last one of them.’ That was exciting,” says Payne. He’s been with the firm ever since.

Payne says his courtroom style has evolved. “I’m more aggressive today than I was when I started,” he says. Peterson, who once worked with the adult Payne on a legal matter, has seen how the younger attorney’s competitive nature has helped him grow as a professional and as a person. “He doesn’t fool himself that he’s perfect,” says Peterson. “If he identifies a weakness, he’ll fix it.”

In the courtroom, Payne likes to use everyday examples—sometimes involving his wife, Tracie; their sons, Caleb and Joshua, and daughter Taryn—to explain the complexities of accidents and injuries experienced by clients. “A lot of my examples involve my children or my life experiences, particularly when I have a lot of people on my jury with children,” says Payne. His sons are now attorneys themselves, both at Vinson & Elkins.

During one union case, Payne needed to explain to the jurors how a warning system worked when a piece of equipment overheated, and how it could have been disregarded. In court, he asked the jurors if they had ever entered a crowded elevator without taking the weight limit into consideration. “That was me showing the jurors that sometimes warnings, even though they’re clearly stated, go unreceived,” says Payne. “And of course I knew that, when the jurors went to lunch, they were going to look at that warning in the elevator.”

One case is particularly close to his heart. In the fall of 2012, Cheryl Sinegal, a childhood acquaintance, was involved in a car accident with an 18-wheeler that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Payne received a call asking him to meet with Sinegal in the hospital. 

“Now when I see her at events, I know she’s taken care of. And I see the results of the work that I performed,” says Payne.

 A woman of strong faith, Sinegal credits prayerful discernment with leading her to consider Payne. “It didn’t have anything to do with him being my childhood friend,” says Sinegal. “I also did my homework on James. It was about how intelligent he is and all the cases he’s won. He listens carefully, tailoring his strategy to each unique need.”

“This was someone who had watched me grow up,” says Payne. Once the case was settled, he encouraged her to hire a financial adviser. “I had some strong convictions on what she should do with the money, and she followed my advice to a T,” says Payne. Sinegal points out that even today, 13 years after he handled her case, he checks in on her. 

The hard-charging attorney’s path hasn’t always been smooth. After a health incident in 2006, he put pen to paper, writing a self-published book, I Am Healed, But I Am Still Sick? He says, “I did an analysis from a spiritual standpoint about how you can accept the faith of healing and not be healed physically.” 

One night in October 2015, Payne was flying back to Texas after attending an NFL game in St. Louis when he began experiencing stroke-like symptoms. The plane made an emergency landing and he was rushed to the hospital, where he was sent home after receiving treatment and seeing his symptoms subside. The experience was confirmation of what he had written in his book. 

Eventually, a doctor determined that a blood clot had traveled from his heart to his brain. “It made me really appreciate the fact that life is precious,” says Payne. “It just puts things in perspective.” 

Maintaining that perspective in the face of his innate competitiveness, Payne admits, is the real challenge. “You work your entire life to be at the top of your game, but you have to ask yourself, ‘What am I giving up to stay there?’” Spending more time with family is one of the things Payne would like to prioritize.

Not long ago, Coach Gamble presented Payne with a basketball metaphor as they discussed his work/life balance: His team is up by 20 points in the fourth quarter. What would he tell a teammate who was still shooting 3-pointers?

“I said, ‘He shouldn’t do that.’ And Coach told me, ‘So why are you still shooting threes? You’re flying here, you’re flying there. You ought to go into a fourth quarter stall and win the game’,” says Payne. “And he’s right.”

Shaping the Future

In March, Payne lost a longtime friend, Democratic U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner. “He was a great man, and it is a great loss—not just for me, but for Houston,” says Payne, who worked on Turner’s first mayoral campaign in the early 1990s and has remained active in politics. Eight years ago, Payne created the 1 Reaches 7 campaign, to encourage people to vote. 

When it comes to politics, Payne says, “I don’t necessarily promote a party. What I promote is: You ought to vote, and you ought to vote with knowledge.”  

In 2005, he created the Buy 90 campaign to raise awareness of and promote Black-owned businesses in Southeast Texas. Today, he speaks to colleagues and other groups about racial bias among juries.

“We are reactive,” Payne says of American society. “If we’re going to change the future, we have to get our young adults ages 18 to 30 to be more active.”