Walking the Talk

During more than a half-century in practice—and, by his count, more than 100  jury trials—Houston litigator Fred Hagans has, among other things, put a CIA agent on the stand, got the Chinese government to answer a written deposition, and helped defend Selena’s killer.

Because of him, Texas established a child’s right to sue for loss of a catastrophically injured parent’s consortium; and the state raised the evidentiary bar for expert testimony. 

But Hagans’ most enduring legacy may be the code of professionalism that every Texas attorney is asked to uphold: the Texas Lawyer’s Creed. In 1989, as one of the two committee co-chairs appointed by the Supreme Court of Texas, he helped craft every word of the state’s mandate for legal professionalism, even recommending the line that stands as a testament to its virtue: “I am committed to this creed for no other reason than it is right.”

George C. Hanks Jr., judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, says it’s a standard that Hagans embodies. “He has worked tirelessly to make sure that lawyers around the state uphold the highest standards in everything they do—in not only their practice, but in their personal lives,” he says. “And, you know, he walks the talk.”

Hagans set his sights on the law before he was even in his teens. His father, a mail carrier, was losing sleep over a legal dispute. “Somebody was trying to claim that he owed them some money when he didn’t,” Hagans says. “Back then, on a mail carrier’s salary, you didn’t have a whole lot of spare money.”

Luckily, his father had some lawyers on his route. He asked one what to do, and was helped immediately. “That sort of painted a wonderful picture of lawyers as people who helped others,” says Hagans. “By the time I headed off to college, I knew that that was an intermediate step, and that I would ultimately be heading to law school.” 

Even so, Hagans took the road less traveled to the law—through statistics and psychology. “Math because it was easy, and psychology because it was fun,” he says. “I remember trying a case early on, a suicide malpractice case. [I presented] the statistical analysis in terms of, ‘What is the probability of somebody who is mentally depressed dying, versus the probability of them getting well?’ When untreated, the statistical probability skyrocketed in terms of potential death by suicide. Whereas, when properly treated, the number dropped to very, very low. Things like that probably just gave me a little different perspective.”

After earning both his bachelor’s and J.D. from UT Austin, Hagans joined Bracewell in 1972. “I was approximately the 23rd lawyer at the firm,” he says. “You did everything: You did research, you did the pleadings, the discovery. And, if it had to be appealed, you handled the appeal. It was a wonderful way to learn.”

In 1982 he co-founded O’Quinn and Hagans, then started his own firm, Hagans, in 1986. While the firm has branched out from its original personal injury practice, the number of attorneys it employs has remained relatively steady. “I decided early on that I wanted to have a law firm that had basically six to 10 lawyers,” Hagans says. “Keeping a small group, I think you get to be selective. You don’t have to take cases that you don’t want to.”

The cases Hagans has selected have spanned the globe, and have seen him take on everyone from massive multinational oil companies to a bar manager with a baseball bat. There were cases involving refinery explosions, black mold, and one where a jilted lover sicced a private investigator on his former girlfriend and her married paramour. “That one had a lot of sex appeal,” Hagans says with a laugh.

In 2016, he won “a significant amount of money” for the family of a man killed in a terrorist attack at one of BP’s subsidiaries in Algeria, helped by the former CIA station chief’s expert testimony. In another case, Hagans got the owners of a drilling ship that sank in a typhoon in the South China Sea, killing 81, to agree to a $51 million settlement after he got the Chinese government to weigh in on the question of negligence. 

The outcomes don’t surprise personal injury attorney Jaime A. Saenz, a partner at Colvin, Saenz, Rodriguez & Kennamer in Brownsville, who faced off against Hagans in a case involving a bicyclist hit by a car. “He’s a superior advocate in the courtroom, very smooth,” Saenz says. “He’s the consummate gentleman lawyer.” 

The variety and complexity of the cases has appealed to Hagans’ intellectual curiosity, making a supremely demanding career enjoyable, Hagans adds. “That is a wonderful way to spend a life. It is not an easy life, but it is a fun life.”