Courtroom crusader: Brownsville plaintiff's attorney wins top national ranking

He doesn’t wear a cape, but rather a suit and tie. His nemesis isn’t Lex Luthor, but rather trucking companies that break the rules. He’s Michael Cowen, "Super Lawyer 2010."

"Super Lawyer" is a national attorney-rating designation meant to identify outstanding attorneys in various legal specialties.

Candidates such as Cowen — a Brownsville-based personal injury plaintiff’s lawyer — are nominated by their peers. The results are published each year in special supplements for leading newspapers and in city and regional magazines, as well as in Super Lawyer magazine.

In Texas, the results are published annually in Texas Monthly magazine, which includes its Super Lawyers list in this month’s issue.

Cowen, 40, is a Brownsville native who earned his law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, then went on to earn the highest score on the Texas Bar Exam among all his fellow test-takers.

He went to work as a law clerk for Reynaldo Garza, the country’s first Hispanic federal court judge, appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. After a year, Cowen moved to New York to work for a high-powered Wall Street firm.

"I worked for the firm that invented the mortgage-backed security, which has done so much for our economy," he said. "I worked there about a year, then I came back home, because I was in love."

Cowen’s love interest was Lesley Jimenez — the future Lesley Cowen. In addition to the lure of romance, Cowen’s stint on Wall Street fell short of expectations.

"I found that the experience of working with a big firm was not particularly valuable," he said. "I got lots of experience writing memos on obscure points of law that were never going to leave the office, and other than the fact that they were going to generate a big bill to the client, had no other meaning or purpose."

Many of Cowen’s colleagues were products of Harvard and Yale who’d graduated at the top of their class and had the egos to match, but who’d never seen the inside of a courtroom.

"No one at big firms tries lawsuits," he said. "I met lawyers who had been there for 10 years who had never been to trial. I met a lawyer who’d been there eight years who never asked a witness a question in a deposition. And they’re all scared to death of it. They think they’re so much smarter than everybody else, but the thought of actually having to try a case in front of a jury terrifies them."

Cowen, on the other hand, loves a good trial, confessing a weakness for "interesting cases." Back in Brownsville after New York, his career wound through a handful of partnerships before he launched his own firm, The Cowen Group.

Cowen’s specialty these days is "big rig" cases — specifically, forcing trucking companies to hand over documents in crashes involving 18-wheelers. The reason is to determine whether, for instance, a company violated the law by keeping a driver behind the wheel too many hours without a break.

"We’ve caught them up to 26 hours, a guy on the road without sleep," Cowen said. "What happens is these guys end up drifting off and just slam into people."

A trucking company makes more money keeping drivers on the road past the legal limit, but when they get caught their insurance premiums go up, which gives safe companies the advantage.

"The other thing is when I have (a client) come into my office, they’ve been hurt and they’re out of work, and they have a bunch of bills," Cowen said. "We can actually get that all paid off and get them some compensation. To have them walk out of my office better off than when they walked in, that feels good."

While the Valley once had a reputation for sympathetic juries and judges, changing societal attitudes have made it tough even for deserving plaintiffs to get a break in personal injury cases, he said. Cowen said he spends half of his time just convincing juries his clients’ claims have merit.

"There’s a presumption among many people that are in the jury pool that if you’re asking for money because you got hurt, you must by committing fraud," he said. "The presumption when you walk in there is you’re just trying to pull one over on people."

As for the Super Lawyer accolade, Cowen said it’s deceptive in the sense that it doesn’t recognize the role the firm’s team plays in his accomplishments.

Being on the Super Lawyer list doesn’t mean he’s better than every lawyer not on the list, he added, though Cowen did have this piece of advice for anyone in the market for an attorney:

"If you think that you might need a lawyer you probably do. Go online and do some research before you hire somebody, and don’t just look at what the lawyers say about themselves. Look how they get rated. See if they’re board-certified. Just try to be educated and make an educated decision. It’s like any other profession: There’s lots of good lawyers out there, there’s a lot of bad lawyers out there, and there’s a whole bunch that are just average."