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FROM THE EDITOR
How Things Were Searching for more about the evolution of Harris County law, I met with one of our older HBA members, Judge William M. (Bill) Hatten, who remembers how things really were back when I was only five. Judge Hatten was born in Houston’s Fifth Ward in 1913. He graduated from St. Thomas High School in 1931 and attended Houston Law School. He graduated in 1934 and was licensed in 1935. Houston’s population was less than 300,000 at that time. Except for a few years in the Marine Corps during WWII (as a PFC), Judge Hatten has practiced and continues to practice law at age 96. Here are excerpts from our conversation about his early days as a Houston lawyer. “My first real law office was at the corner of Preston and Main. Many other Houston lawyers were also in buildings near the 1910 domed civil courthouse. I still have the bill of sale for my first desk. That desk cost me $25 - with no sales tax. In those days you knew every other lawyer in the county because there weren’t many lawyers. I never counted them, but I reckon there were about 250 at that time, including maybe six ladies and six minority (black) lawyers. “Mutual and personal respect were the way of life. Friday morning docket call was a place of camaraderie. Peterson’s Café stood between Main and Fannin on the north side of Preston. On Friday morning from about 6 until 8:45, most small practitioners with cases in court sat at Peterson’s, drinking coffee or eating breakfast and talking with each other about our cases. We were looking for helpful suggestions on how to handle our cases. But we often solved procedural problems with our opponents, and we reached an occasional settlement. “Filing answers on time in civil cases was not really essential because there was very little chance of being hit with a default judgment. Once the client showed up at your office with a citation, you called the other lawyer to let him know you were on the case. There was no need for a Rule 11 type of agreement, and of course there was no Rule 11 back then anyway. “Law firms tended to be real big or real small. Ours was one of the smaller firms - Dawson and Hatten - two lawyers and a secretary. We had no formal partnership agreement, but what we had was a joint bank account into which all client fees were deposited - regardless of whose client. After office expenses were paid, we split the pot 50-50. I handled uncontested divorces for $25. (Filing fees were $3.) One of my more profitable years was when I prepared income tax returns for longshoremen at $5 to $10 per person. “We had few standard forms. Most everything was prepared from scratch. Unlike today, lawyers had no personal keyboards, and certainly no “memory.” We used lots of yellow pads, and we had dictation machines with wax cylinders that captured our words. Retyping whole documents after edits took an abundance of secretarial time. Reproduction was nearly unheard of. Carbon paper was how we got our copies. Trials were shorter in those days. I think those shorter trials were due to the fact that paperwork was harder to generate then than it is today. “Judges were more aloof than I think they are today. I tried cases for about five years before I was invited into a judge’s chambers. Also, courts seemed to be more concerned with justice at the moment for the case at hand than they were with precedential perfection. In other words, judges seemed to want to get to a good and fair result for the parties from the facts before the court rather than just going by the book and getting technical precision. “As for bricks and mortar, compare today’s civil courthouse with the old one. Also compare the criminal courthouse today with what we had in 1936. The seven-story criminal courts building was then at Capital and Bagby. Two county courtrooms were in the basement. The first floor was occupied one-half by the District Attorney, and one-half by the Sheriff’s office. On the second floor were the only two Harris County criminal district courts. The top five floors were the county jail - housing up to 200 prisoners. Today we have 22 criminal district courts, two enormous county jails and more than six outlying jail facilities that all together can hold 9,000 prisoners.”
Editor’s Note I would like to thank two of our editorial board members for their outstanding work on our last two magazines: John Gray for this environmental law issue and Robert Painter for our September-October edition on veterans’ legal issues.
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