Entertaining trial war stories and precious gems of legal-practice wisdom flowed from three “Texas legal legends” at a panel Thursday at the State Bar of Texas Annual Meeting in Austin.

The panel aimed to pass on tips from longtime, distinguished lawyers to young attorneys just starting out in the profession. Moderators Joel Towner of Beck Redden in Houston and Sally Pretorius, president of the Texas Young Lawyers Association, questioned Jim Harrington, Broadus Spivey and Royal Furgeson about lessons and mistakes during their legal careers.

Furgeson, a former federal judge and founding dean of the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law, told the tale of the time that, back when he was a young attorney serving as a law clerk for a Lubbock federal judge, he witnessed a young lawyer–it was Spivey–give the only court experiment that Furgeson ever saw succeed. That's saying a lot, considering that Furgeson tried up to 70 cases as a lawyer and then presided over an untold number on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Furgeson explained that the client of Spivey, now a partner in Spivey & Grigg in Austin, sued the manufacturer of a car jack that had failed as Spivey's client did car repairs, causing the car to fall and seriously injure the man. As Furgeson recalls, an expert for the manufacturer said arrogantly on the stand that the car jacks never fail.

“Broadus said, 'Tell me, if you jack this thing up like this and put the safety in, your jack will never fail,” Furgeson said. “Broadus hit the jack, and the jack fell down.”

When the jury was deliberating, the only question they sent out asked whether they were limited in the amount of damages they were able to award the plaintiff, he said.

He didn't realize at that point in his career that such experiments rarely work, he explained. Years later, when he tried out his own court experiment in a case–he lost.

When asked to share the top lessons they'd learned in their years of practice, Spivey said that attorneys' first obligation should be to act like a human being in their interactions with their clients.

“That client needs help and that client can't relate to you if you are just a lawyer. It means you have to have those qualities of a human being: the ability to listen the ability to avoid lecturing,” Spivey said.

Understanding the human needs of clients has been key in Harrington's whole career, he said. Harrington, the former director of the civil rights nonprofit firm the Texas Civil Rights Project, said he deeply respected the dignity of his clients. The goal was to recognize the community and work to facilitate their needs, empower them to self-organize, and win lawsuits that would provide political capital for the group to push for their own rights.

“I began to see that was so important in legal work. It's not just some isolated case. It's what can we do to make a change in the community,” he said.

Pretorius asked the speakers about the biggest mistakes they've made in their long careers.

Spivey said lawyers pick a jury and then jurors sit in box, often ignored by the lawyers.

“You've got to live with the jury. You've got to understand the jury, because your relationship does not end when they are put in a jury box—it begins,” Spivey said. “They are just as much a part of that trial as you are.”