Donald H. Kidd

Fewer than one in ten Texas lawyers ever earn board certification in Personal Injury Trial Law from the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Donald H. Kidd has held that credential since 2001, and it sits atop more than thirty years of trial work. He is a name partner and co-founder of Perdue & Kidd, the Houston firm he launched with Jim Perdue, Jr. after concluding that injured people deserved a practice built entirely around pursuing justice against negligent companies.

What makes Kidd unusual among Houston plaintiff’s lawyers is where he started: on the other side. His first five years were spent at Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP defending corporations in personal injury and products liability suits — an apprenticeship in exactly how defendants dissect, delay, and devalue claims. He then switched sides permanently, spending eleven years as a senior trial lawyer at a large plaintiff’s firm before founding Perdue & Kidd. Today he represents people harmed in car crashes, truck wrecks, workplace fires and explosions, and by defective products, and he knows the defense playbook because he once ran it.

His academic record foreshadowed the career. After a B.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, Kidd attended South Texas College of Law Houston, where he made the Dean’s List every semester, won the Vanderbilt Invitational Moot Court championship, was inducted into the Order of the Lytae honor society and Phi Delta Phi, and graduated summa cum laude in 1991. He is licensed in Texas and New Mexico, admitted to the Southern, Northern, and Eastern federal districts of Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court, and has appeared by special admission in California and Missouri courts.

His standing among fellow trial lawyers is hard to overstate. Kidd serves as president of the Houston chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates, is a past president of the Houston Trial Lawyers Association, and previously served as Vice President of Communications and a director of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association. He spent 2009 through 2015 on the exam committee that writes the very board-certification test he passed, chaired a State Bar of Texas grievance panel, and is a Life Fellow of both the Houston Bar Foundation and the Texas Bar Foundation. Texas Monthly has listed him as a Texas Super Lawyer every year since 2004, H Texas Magazine named him among its best lawyers for the people from 2006 through 2009, and Martindale-Hubbell rates him AV Preeminent.

Kidd is the right fit for serious cases with a corporate defendant on the other side — major vehicle and 18-wheeler collisions, industrial fires and explosions, and injuries caused by defective products — where insight into defense strategy translates directly into leverage. Perdue & Kidd takes cases on contingency with a free consultation, so injured clients pay nothing unless there is a recovery.