James B. Sales, former president of the Houston Bar Association and former president of the State Bar of Texas, was honored in February with the Outstanding Service Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, an honorary organization of lawyers, judges and legal scholars whose public and private careers have demonstrated outstanding dedication to the welfare of their communities and to the highest principles of the legal profession. The Outstanding Service Award is given to the Fellow who has, in his or her professional career, adhered for more than 30 years to the tradition of service to the profession and to the service of the public.

Sales is of counsel to Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P, where he practiced for nearly 50 years as a litigator, leading the firm’s litigation department from 1979-2000.  As president of the HBA in 1980-81, he initiated the Houston Volunteer Lawyers Program, which is today one of the largest legal service providers in the state. Sales led the State Bar of Texas to adopt a mass disaster plan to prohibit improper solicitation and harassment of victims in disaster situations, a plan now used as a model by many other bars. In 2004, the Texas Supreme Court appointed Sales to chair the Texas Access to Justice Commission, created in 2001 to formulate solutions for the delivery of legal services to low-income people and expand the delivery of legal services on a statewide basis to millions of poor Texans. Over the course of his career, Sales built a record of service and leadership at the local, state and national levels.

In accepting the award, Sales reflected on the core values, definitions of excellence and respect for the rule of law that have been his guides:

“I am profoundly honored and privileged to be a recipient of this coveted award. …

“When I joined [Fulbright & Jaworski] as a trial lawyer in 1960, Leon Jaworski was managing partner and head of the general litigation department. Kraft Eidman, later managing partner after Col. Jaworksi, was head of the tort and insurance trial department; and Gibson Gayle Jr., who would later become managing partner, was a newly-minted trial partner to whom I had been assigned for work. In the years that followed, I worked with and tried cases for each of these talented partners as well as other accomplished trial partners of that era. What was particularly striking and is still indelibly etched in my mind is the commonality of their core values – the values of excellence, integrity and service to the profession and the community.

“Excellence by their definition meant getting it right – getting it almost right or coming close was never, under any circumstances, an acceptable option. Integrity meant that a lawyer’s word was his or her solemn bond and a breach of that bond simply would not be tolerated. Service to the profession and the community meant a lawyer’s responsibility to give back generously of his or her talent and time to the profession and to the community at large. By deed and especially by their daily practice, these legendary giants exemplified the very essence of what they preached. I know that their example shaped my own value system as a lawyer long before I became a partner in the firm. In fact, when the Texas Supreme Court approached me and requested that I chair the recently created Access to Justice Commission and get about the task of making access to justice work for the many less fortunate citizens of Texas, it was probably foreordained that I would not refuse the call.

“In Texas, with a  population of more than 25 million and a poor and low-income population now exceeding five million, access to justice surely has proven to be the most daunting, the most frustrating, and the most overwhelming challenge that I have ever encountered in the practice of law, even when compared to the always difficult, often challenging and occasionally gut-wrenching adversarial trial practice.

“As lawyers, we learned early on about the role of the law in our society. Equally important, our society created a system of justice as the mechanism through and by which the rule of law is affirmed and applied every day throughout the country. If that is true, as I believe it to be, then every citizen, regardless of status or economic circumstances, as a matter of right, should be entitled to unimpeded access to the justice system. Otherwise, the supremacy and majesty of the rule of law translates into little more than a meaningless abstraction to those who cannot afford legal representation – after all, lawyers hold the keys to the courthouse.

“Although the demands of the Access to Justice Commission for the past five years have been mentally and physically grueling in the extreme, working on the front lines to help those in need has proven to be the most rewarding and incredibly satisfying experience of my professional life. And equally noteworthy, working with access to justice has made me acutely sensitive to the fact that, as lawyers, we all are heirs to a profoundly unique and proud heritage. As such, we owe much to those legendary giants of our profession who preceded us and who contributed so magnificently to sustaining the rule of law and advancing the cause of justice in our society.

“As Daniel Webster remarked in a speech to the Charleston, South Carolina Bar in 1847: ‘The law – it has honored us, may we honor it.’ Indeed, may we always honor and revere the majesty that is the law.”