Greenberg Traurig shareholder Mike Gruber sometimes wonders how close he came to never having the legal career that has brought him so much fulfillment.
A highly successful business litigator whose roster of clients has included members of the prominent Hunt family and businesses such as Securus Technologies, Gruber was born the youngest of nine children in a family where, as he put it, no one so much as “sniffed college” except for a brother who went to seminary. College — much less a career in law — was not a path anyone mapped out for him.
Until he met Nancy Solana, a civics teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas.
“She just didn’t know what it meant for somebody to take an interest and just tell me that I could be something other than a mechanic,” Gruber said.
Solana’s intervention changed the trajectory of Gruber’s life. He has spent much of the decades since quietly paying that opportunity forward, leveraging his bar card, relationships and resources to help shape Dallas beyond the courtroom.
His latest project is Halperin Park in South Dallas, a sprawling new development that community leaders say is poised to help drive economic opportunity in one of the city’s historically underserved areas and reconnect neighborhoods divided decades ago when Interstate 35E cut through the community.
The park is only the latest in a long list of civic projects Gruber has quietly pushed forward over decades in Dallas, particularly in the southern part of the city. His work has ranged from helping guide the Dallas Zoo through decades of growth and leading a $1 million effort to build and refurbish homes to his pro bono representation of a Dallas mayor and school board president during public crises.
This is the story of the heavyweight Dallas litigator behind the scenes of some of the city’s major civic projects.
In Nancy Solana’s civics and history class, the teacher used legal cases to explore the major issues in American government.
Solana recalls a bright young Gruber expressing a natural interest in legal reasoning.
She assigned what she called “Six-Weeks Projects,” which allowed students to pursue independent study or action in an area of interest for class credit. For his project, Gruber worked on the successful 1974 campaign of Dallas ISD school board member Bill Hunter. Hunter had served on the board for about a year when redrawn district lines forced him to run again. The Texas Observer called him “decidedly the underdog.”
Gruber spent much of his senior year knocking on doors and making calls to help elect Hunter, continuing his work well beyond the required six weeks. Hunter won and went on to serve as vice president and president of the board.
Gruber, now 70, considers Solana’s decision to take an interest in him one of the most consequential events of his life.
Solana said she did not realize then that the possibilities she saw for Gruber were options he had never considered for himself.
“What I saw was a bright student who was interested in what I was teaching,” Solana said. “He was willing to see another possibility for his future and had the courage to act on it.”
“What is truly extraordinary is Mike’s constant gratitude for the help and encouragement I was able to give him,” she said. “He has paid that forward many times over.”
At Southern Methodist University, Gruber reconnected with former high school classmate Diane Bucy, the daughter of former Texas Instruments CEO J. Fred Bucy Jr.
They had both attended Thomas Jefferson High School, where Mike said everyone wanted to date Diane, a popular member of the cheer team. Though they shared a Spanish class in high school, it was at SMU that they really got to know each other.
One day in September, Mike spotted Diane carrying a package across campus. Knowing her parents lived only a short drive away, he asked why she was receiving a package on campus.
Diane explained that a friend who had moved away sent her a birthday present. Mike responded by offering to take her to lunch for her birthday.
“It was like an instant connection and a very surreal type of experience,” Diane said.
They went to Raphael’s on McKinney Avenue, where they were met with a long wait. To pass the time, they wandered through a nearby antique shop and found themselves admiring a grandfather clock. Before the lunch was over, they were discussing the house they might someday share and where that grandfather clock would sit in the entryway.
“We were just connecting on this level, but we really didn’t know each other at the time,” Diane said.
Several months later, Diane’s father needed someone to retrieve a sailboat he had left in the Bahamas but was unable to go himself due to work.
“Doesn’t that Mike kid sail?” Diane recalled her father asking.
Mike’s experience at that time was with much smaller boats, but Diane said he knew the drill. So he sailed the boat back with Diane, her mother and brother. The trip went so well that not long afterward, Mike asked Diane’s father for his blessing to propose.
The couple wed in 1978. After a weeklong honeymoon on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, Diane went to work at Republic National Bank and Mike started law school. Their first home as husband and wife was a room in the house of a Highland Park woman who liked the security of having married law students living on the property. She also imposed a 6 p.m. curfew.
After Gruber graduated from law school in 1981, the couple looked for a house in Dallas’ Kessler Park neighborhood. But even with Gruber’s associate salary and a signing bonus, the leafy Oak Cliff neighborhood was out of reach, particularly with the era’s high interest rates.
So they kept looking further south.
Read More
Read the whole article “The Heavyweight Litigator Quietly Behind Halperin Park and Other Major Civic Projects in Dallas” on The Texas Lawbook website.
To download a PDF of the article, click the media link below.