Houston lawyers give Lake high marks for fairness, intellect and for allowing them a little wiggle room in terms of jury selection and rhetorical flourishes. The Houston Bar Association consistently rates Lake among the top three federal judges in the Southern District of Texas. Last year, 73.9 percent of the lawyers taking part in the survey gave him an "outstanding" rating. Another group named him Trial Judge of the Year in 1998.
Lake has dealt with cases similar to Lay's and Skilling's that were both financially complex and attractive to the media.
In 1999 the judge threw out nearly two dozen shareholder lawsuits against Zapata Corp. Investors had accused its top executives of insider trading, claiming that they had hyped the stock and sold $6 million worth when the share price doubled, soon after which the price nosedived. Zapata was founded by George H.W. Bush and a few colleagues in the 1950s, although the former president was no longer involved in the company at the time of the events alleged in the lawsuits.
Lake ruled that optimistic public statements made by Zapata executives about a series of planned Internet acquisitions were merely "puffery" that "no reasonable investor would rely on."
Houston securities lawyer Thomas R. Ajamie, who defended several Zapata executives in the lawsuits, said it had "all the hallmarks of a very complex case with a lot of media attention. But when we went into his courtroom, we were just lawyers." He said Lake ignored the hoopla surrounding the cases to concentrate on the issues at the heart of the dispute.
The Skilling and Lay case encompasses tens of millions of dollars in stock sales by executives who knew that Enron's share price had been inflated by fraud, including secret partnerships that helped the company inflate profits and bury millions in debt, prosecutors claim. Enron's prominence and Lay's role as a Republican fundraiser helped turn the company's bankruptcy in December 2001 into a national news story. Lay, Skilling, and Causey have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
Former partners of Lake's at the Houston law firm Fulbright & Jaworski said it is typical for the judge to delve straight into difficult legal issues. Lake spent his entire career in private practice trying environmental and business cases at Fulbright.
David J. Beck, Lake's mentor and the partner who recruited him from the University of Texas law school, said he used to tease the judge that "he could actually build a glass plant himself" after they handled a difficult environmental case in Waco that involved the glass manufacturing process.
Several colleagues at Fulbright said they were surprised when Lake told them in the late 1980s that he hoped to become a judge, in part because he was not highly political, said retired partner Rufus Wallingford. Others cited the close, profitable relationships with clients that Lake had nurtured.
Lake's defense of Browning-Ferris Industries Inc. in a civil rights case was criticized by African American and labor groups when he was nominated as a federal judge. Critics also pointed out that Lake had belonged to a country club with no black members. But a bipartisan group of lawyers and sitting judges rushed to his defense, and the Senate confirmed him a few months later.
These days, friends say, Lake prefers to spend time outside the office with his wife, Carol, with whom he has two adult sons. Lake, a history major at Texas A&M, told the local trade publication Houston Lawyer in 2001 that he likes to read history books and magazines in his spare time.
One case over which Lake presided may shed some light on a key issue to come in the Enron prosecutions. In 1997 Lake directed the acquittal of controversial cancer doctor Stanislaw R. Burzynski on nearly three dozen counts of mail fraud after a jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. The government had pursued Burzynski, who prosecutors claimed was peddling untested drug therapies, for nearly 14 years.
Lay's attorney, Michael Ramsey, was one of four lawyers who defended Burzynski. One of the jurors later said that they could not agree on whether the doctor intended to break the law by shipping his experimental medicines across state lines -- precisely the kind of "state of mind" issue that will play a central role in the case against Lay and Skilling.
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