Rusty Hardin's Comments About Joe

Joe grew up in Liberty, Texas and attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate, where he graduated in 1988. He then went into the U.S. Marine Corps. Joe attained the rank of 1st Lieutenant and was a decorated officer in the Marine Corps during Desert Storm, the first Gulf War. After leaving the Marine Corps, he graduated from the University of Houston Law Center and then clerked for Justice Murry Cohen on the First Court of Appeals. After clerking for the Court of Appeals, he joined McGinnis, Lochridge and Kilgore, where he did primarily appellate work, an area of concentration he has continued while at our firm.

Joe is an excellent appellate attorney and continues to consider that his primary vocation. He is very active in bar appellate circles, most recently being elected to the Houston Bar Association appellate section council, where he chairs the pro bono committee. He proudly refers to himself as an “appellate geek.” In reality, however, he is far more than a one-note artist. He has increasingly taken the lead in developing and managing complex personal injury and business litigation cases that started out with forlorn potential. Through his sheer determination and legal imagination, he has achieved incredibly favorable settlements in several of these thorny cases during the last few years. He has done a remarkable job conducting the discovery for these cases and preparing them for trial. Joe has also been a wonderful asset and resource in assisting the other attorneys in the office with instant high-quality legal research and writing on short notice for a wide variety of cases. Joe concentrates exclusively on civil cases.

Joe is married, and he and his wife Tamara have two children, Amelia and Gabriel. Tamara is engaged in the full-time occupation of taking care of Amelia and Gabriel.