One of Michael Simons' earliest memories is of seeing his father holding a pair of scissors that he had just pulled out of a pot of boiling water.

Simons, an IP litigator now serving as partner-in-charge of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld's office in Austin, Texas, recalls his father walking past him, scissors in hand, into an adjacent room in the family's two-room log cabin to cut the umbilical cord of his sister, whom his mother had just given birth to in their home.

“It was December of 1975,” and Simons was about 2 years old, he recalls in a recent phone conversation with The Am Law Daily. “It was—we don't know how cold it was—but it was [at least] 40 below,” Simons adds, explaining that the family's thermometer only went down to negative 40 degrees.