Airline Is Attorney’s New Target : Courts: Famous for his win in Texaco-Pennzoil case, Joseph Jamail is now taking on American in predatory-pricing lawsuit.

Attorney Joseph Jamail plays his own straight man when asked why--after a victorious $3-billion settlement with Texaco Inc.--he still goes to work.

“I’m a very egotistical person,” said Jamail, sitting with colleagues in the Holiday Inn lounge in this resort town where he’s battling another big corporation, American Airlines, in a high-stakes courtroom brawl.

“I’m vain. And I just want to be part of the process,” Jamail said. “I think I’m doing some good. Obviously I don’t need any more money. Hell, the world knows that.”

Jamail, 67, stunned the corporate and legal worlds in 1985, successfully proving to a jury that Texaco sabotaged plans by his client Pennzoil Co. to merge with Getty Oil Co.

Not only did the jurors believe him, they also awarded his client $10.53 billion in damages in a case many experts said was unwinnable. Texaco sought shelter in bankruptcy court as a result.

Although the award was later reduced in settlement talks to $3 billion, enabling the big oil company to re-emerge from bankruptcy refuge, the amount remains the largest civil damage award in U.S. history.

Jamail’s fee was an estimated $400 million, making him the richest lawyer in the nation in 1988, when Texaco paid Pennzoil, Forbes magazine reported at the time.

It wasn’t the first time Jamail had achieved renown as a litigator. In the 1970s, he won a $6.8-million settlement with Remington Arms Co. for a client injured in a hunting accident. Remingtom recalled 200,000 rifles as a result.

Jamail is now representing Northwest Airlines in that carrier’s joint lawsuit with Continental Airlines against American over allegations of predatory pricing to drive them out of business. As in the Texaco-Pennzoil case, many legal experts say Jamail’s case is unwinnable.

For Jamail, this case is very similar to the Texaco-Pennzoil case--the big picking on the small. To him, it’s a morality play where avarice has overwhelmed ethical conduct.

“We’ve got some well-run corporations by some well-intended people who do it right,” said Jamail. “But we’ve got some real greedy hogs who own no interest in the company they’re running, whose sole interest is in whatever it takes to be able to get to the point to fly out on their golden parachute and milk the shareholder and take risks that they shouldn’t take. This case is a prime example.”

Northwest is counting on Jamail’s record to win up to $3 billion in damages for itself and Continental in the trial, underway in Galveston federal court. The plaintiffs say it cost the two $1 billion to match American’s so-called value-pricing scheme and subsequent half-off sale last summer.

Continental President Robert Ferguson has testified that American’s plan nearly devoured his airline’s cash.

American contends that Continental and Northwest are complaining because they lost the fare war. American’s chairman, Robert Crandall, testified recently that the discounting was simply a competitive strategy, with no intent to drive any rival out of business.

It’s difficult to find anyone to speak badly of Jamail. His aides say they can’t remember the last time he ever lost in court.

Criminal defense attorney and longtime friend Richard Haynes speculated that the American case would pose little problem for Jamail.

“They will come apart like a six-bit suitcase in the rain,” Haynes said. “So shame on them or anybody who wants to get cute with him in this case. I don’t care if they’re Harvard MBAs, they’re going to get their pants down.”

But many believe that no lawyer--not even Jamail--is lucky or good enough to win two enormously challenging cases.

One potentially key difference is that Jamail’s co-counsel in the Pennzoil-Texaco case, Irving Terrell, represents American. Terrell presumably knows how Jamail thinks and can anticipate what his former ally might do in court.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Jamail. “I’d send a cab for him. He’s a good guy.”

It has been a meandering road to courtroom fame for this Houston son and grandson of a Lebanese grocer, who repudiates suggestions that he’s a modern-day Horatio Alger.

“Don’t say I struggled,” Jamail said. “I had everything growing up. I had a convertible, money in my pocket.”

Jamail was 16 when he finished St. Thomas High School, an all-boys institution. His mother, fearful he would be drafted, convinced him to attend nearby Texas A&M; University, another all-male school, so he could receive a college deferment. But Jamail didn’t like it.

First, he enrolled at the University of Texas as a pre-medical student. After a dismal semester--”I can’t stand the sight of blood”--he forged his parents’ names on Marine Corps enlistment papers in 1943. Jamail returned to Austin and the university in 1946, this time focusing on history and law.

“I really had no intention of doing that”--being a lawyer--Jamail said. “What I wanted to do originally is to teach. Teach history. But my mother really wanted me to go to law school.”

With a law degree, he went first to a private firm, “stayed there exactly 20 minutes and quit,” then shifted to the Harris County district attorney’s office. Later he opened a small law firm he still operates, which includes one of his three sons, Joseph Jamail III.

Eight years after Pennzoil-Texaco, which he took on for friend J. Hugh Liedtke, Pennzoil’s chairman, Jamail still expresses amazement over the publicity earned from what he calls just another case.

“I wouldn’t mind being a little more secret. The lack of privacy is disturbing sometimes,” he said. Grocery store visits turn into autograph sessions.