James Karel is truly the sum of his parts.
He has been shaped by an array of influences: his family, the city of Chicago, the United States Army, Korea, and the lawyers under whom he studied. His mannerisms, speech patterns, work ethic, philosophy, and approach to his career come his experiences and adventures. The result is an aggressive but respectful trial attorney who appreciates getting to know his clients.
"I had a couple of really good mentors," he said, "who reminded me that a case wasn't my case, it wasn't the firm's case, it's the client's case."
Others have taken note of Karel's accomplishments. He has a rating of AV from the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Rating system, their highest rating which "shows that a lawyer has reached the height of professional excellence…and is recognized for the highest levels of skill and integrity," according to Martindale-Hubbell.
Karel grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, where his father took him and his three brothers to see White Sox baseball and Blackhawks hockey. After high school, Karel attended Marquette University, where he pursued a goal of a military career and was ROTC unit commander his senior year.
"It was something I wanted to do and thought I would be good at," he explained. "My grandfather served in World War I, and my father was in World War II. But my great grandfather was a draft dodger who left Czechoslovakia to avoid being conscripted."
After graduating from Marquette, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Regular Army in 1974, graduated second in his class as Ranger school, and graduated the Army's Airborne School. Now a Ranger, First Lieutenant Karel was given command of a company at Fort Dix and served as a defacto prosecutor in Chapter 13 Elimination Board Hearings.
"The Army had a significant number of men who shouldn't have been in the Army," Karel said. "Discipline problems, drug problems, AWOL, family violence. So it established an administrative procedure with a five-officer board to judge a particular person's fitness to stay in the Army. The soldier was represented by a JAG officer and the government was represented by young lieutenants like me who, if they were lucky, could find their way to the PX without a map."
Karel, however, did well and continued in the role for three years, until he was sent for a tour of duty in Korea. There the intensity was a little higher.
"Korea was a great place, and I loved the Koreans," Karel said. "I spent a little time on the demilitarized zone. We operated regularly between the DMZ and the Imjin River, and in those days, Korea was the closest thing to an undeclared war that we had. Guys who were on the DMZ more often than I was were regularly getting into fire fights. There were two or three times we felt that things could have gone either way."
After leaving the Army as a captain in 1979 ("I was tired of the politics"), Karel lived in Denver working in construction, then moved to Texas in 1980 and worked for Texas Instruments working on the Harpoon and Tomahawk cruise missile projects. But he felt he needed more specialized training to further his career. His Army training had focused on leadership and working under pressure, and he had enjoyed his work in Elimination Court, so he made use of his VA benefits and went to law school at the University of Texas.
After getting his law license, he started work in business litigation at small firms. In September, 1989, went to work for a medium-sized defense firm until 1996, when he and four other attorneys from that office decided to open their own firm. In 2002, he moved to Dallas, where he founded Karel & Associates (now Karel & Hicks) on January 1, 2003.
"The challenge was having the confidence and faith that it could be done," he said. "There's always the fear of the unknown, but we were fortunate enough to have a large influx of nonsubscriber work, which really helped make the shift. But we made it happen and we've never looked back."
In his twenty-three years of practice, Karel has developed an intensely personal approach to his work, and his military background and his naturally aggressive style are strong influences that he has instilled throughout Karel & Hicks.
"My relationship with any client is very personal and I want to do the best I can for them," he said. "Within ethical reason, we'll do everything we can to represent that client.
To do so, Karel doesn't wait for the other side to get a lawsuit moving. Once suit is filed, he tries to initiate the action, dictate the pace of a lawsuit, and do a thorough investigation in the first sixty days.
"There's a military axiom, 'Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted,' " he said. "In a lawsuit, that means get as much information as you can early on, because then you can make as informed an evaluation as you can."