Coffee Before Conflict
The Judicial Legacy of Judge Solomon “Sol” Casseb III1
1 The Honorable Judge Solomon “Sol” Casseb III (1948–2022) served as judge of the 288th Judicial District Court in Bexar County, Texas, from 2008 to 2018, after more than three decades in private practice with the San Antonio firm of Casseb & Pearl. A respected family law attorney prior to taking the bench, he was appointed to the court by Governor Rick Perry and later elected to the position. After leaving the bench, Judge Casseb continued serving the legal community as a mediator, visiting judge, and of counsel to a San Antonio law firm.
By The Honorable Judge David Canales2 3
2 The Honorable David A. Canales served for more than eleven years as judge of the 73rd Judicial District Court in Bexar County, Texas, where he presided over a broad civil and family law docket, including personal injury, wrongful death, and complex civil disputes. During his judicial tenure, he presided over more than sixty jury trials and hundreds of bench trials. Judge Canales received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Texas-Pan American, with minors in Criminal Justice and Music, and earned his J.D., graduating summa cum laude and as valedictorian, from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. He may be reached at info@dacfirm.com.
3 From left to right: the Honorable David A. Canales, the Honorable Judge Solomon Casseb III.
There is a particular kind of tension that fills a courtroom before every family law case. Lawyers arrive carrying banker’s boxes and the weight of their clients’ worst days ahead of them. Everyone is ready for battle. In Judge Solomon “Sol” Casseb III’s courtroom, that tension rarely had a chance to settle in.
Before any argument was made, he would lean forward from the bench and motion to the lawyers with an invitation as genuine as it was disarming:
“Counsel, let’s grab a cup of coffee before we get started.”
The conversations were brief, but focused on the lawyers, their families, and life in general. His interest in them as people was genuine, and the lawyers knew and felt it. After those few minutes, they returned to the courtroom, and something had shifted. What had been a room poised for conflict became one where the lawyers could still advocate, but with the same calmness Judge Casseb displayed minutes earlier and carried forward to the bench.
Those conversations were never really about coffee, and they were never meant to be a mere infor-mality. They were his reminder to the lawyers in front of him that they were people first and advocates second, and the families whose cases were about to be heard deserved finality without the scars of war, if they could be avoided.
Shaped by years of practicing family law and serving as a mediator, Judge Casseb understood the power and authority of the gavel when he assumed the bench. But he also knew that if he could appeal
to the humanity of the lawyers before him, their clients would benefit rather than pay the price of escala-tion. That price was measured not only in legal fees, but in the futures of families whose lives would never be the same.
As a lawyer who practiced in front of him briefly before I ascended to the bench to work alongside him, Sol taught me that family law is rarely about the law. It is about fear and grief and love gone side-ways. A ruling may resolve a case, but it cannot always heal the wound that brought the case to the court. He understood this with a clarity that some judges never reach. He did not see a judge’s duty as simply deciding cases. Inherent in the role is the capacity to create conditions for people to find their own way, and when they cannot, that is when the judge steps in to rule.
Judges are remembered for many things: their intellect, their rulings, their command of the court-room. Judge Casseb bore those qualities and more. His reputation for working tirelessly, ruling decisively, and knowing the intricacies of Texas family law commanded the respect of every lawyer who appeared before him. But what lawyers remember first is something just as important: the way he treated everyone before him as a fellow human being. He even insisted on being called Sol rather than Judge Casseb. That, as much as anything else, made everyone feel important and eased conflict in his presence.
On December 7, 2022, Sol passed away, leaving the legal community bereft of a living reminder of what the bench is supposed to look like at its best. His mark lives in every lawyer who walked out feeling like a colleague rather than a combatant, and in every case that settled or received a ruling borne from his years of wisdom and the compassion of someone who understood exactly what was at stake. All because Sol understood that the most powerful thing he could do was put down the gavel, pour some coffee, and defuse the tension.
Of all the things I learned from him, the most powerful was that approachability is not the absence of authority. In the right hands, it is the highest expression of it. That is a legacy worth carrying forward. We would all do well not to let it fade.