Todd Mensing has represented energy companies in multimillion-dollar jury trials for and against some of the country’s largest corporations. He has also represented an indigent mother, for free, in a two-week child custody trial against a court-appointed attorney working to keep her son with his father.
That case was one of several Mensing tried for the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid Society, known as TRLA, a nonprofit that provides free civil legal services to low-income Texans. Mensing served as the organization’s trial lawyer for a stretch of his career. He traveled from Houston into South Texas to represent clients who could not otherwise afford one. “I became the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid Society’s trial lawyer for their trials, and I traveled throughout South Texas and Houston trying cases for them,” Mensing said in an interview.
TRLA was founded in 1970 to represent migrant farmworkers in nine South Texas counties. A 2002 merger with four regional legal aid programs expanded its reach, and the organization now covers 68 counties in southwest Texas, handling more than 45 practice areas that include family law, housing, employment and farmworker rights. It serves roughly 23,000 clients a year against an eligible population of more than 2.6 million low-income Texas residents in its service area.
That gap between need and capacity is not unique to South Texas. A 2022 study by the Legal Services Corporation, the federally funded organization that oversees civil legal aid nationally, found that low-income Americans receive no or insufficient legal help for 92% of the civil problems that have a substantial impact on their lives. Custody disputes fall inside that gap. Unlike criminal defendants, parents in family court have no constitutional right to appointed counsel, which means the outcome of a custody fight can turn heavily on whether either side can pay a lawyer.
Legal aid organizations close part of that gap with staff attorneys, but a group the size of TRLA cannot cover every county in its territory with its own lawyers. Trial-level cases, the ones that require a lawyer capable of examining witnesses and arguing to a jury rather than negotiating a settlement, are the hardest to staff and the most consequential to lose. Mensing’s arrangement with the organization filled a specific need. A commercial litigator with a full trial practice donated the kind of courtroom skill a legal aid budget rarely has room to hire outright.
The Custody Trial
The case Mensing points to involved a mother fighting to keep custody of her minor child. Working against her was an attorney ad litem, a lawyer who is appointed by Texas courts to represent a child’s own stated wishes in a family case, distinct from the separate role of an amicus attorney, who advocates for what a neutral party judges to be the child’s best interest. In this case, the ad litem had aligned with the father.
Mensing described the position as one most litigators would treat as close to unwinnable. “The ad litem who represents the minor child was on the side of the father,” he said. “So here, the minor child’s court-appointed representative was against us.” Rather than conceding the point, Mensing built his defense around undermining the ad litem’s credibility. “I attacked the bias of the ad litem in favor of the father, and I attacked the diligence to show that he was just taking a fee without doing any work,” he said. “Our worst fact became one of our best facts because all the people on the side of the father were questionable now to the jury.”
The trial ran two weeks, longer than most contested custody cases and longer than many of the commercial disputes Mensing has tried for paying clients. He won.
Discrediting a court-appointed representative for a child is a delicate maneuver, and one that requires a lawyer willing to press an aggressive theory against a party the jury may instinctively want to trust. A weaker cross-examination, or one that came across as an attack on the child rather than on the ad litem’s conduct, could easily have backfired. Mensing frames that risk as the point: a fact that looked disqualifying on its face, a lawyer for the child siding with the other parent, became persuasive once the jury understood how little work had gone into that position.
A Pattern, Not a Single Case
The TRLA custody trial was not an isolated act of charity squeezed between paying matters. Mensing has described his pro bono docket as a deliberate strategy for building trial skill early in his career, alongside unrelated pro bono criminal defense work he also took on during the same period. “I’ve done many, many trials pro bono to meet my goal of trying four or five, six cases a year. It’s not something you need to overthink,” he said. “The more you do it, the better you get.”
Asked to estimate the value of that work, Mensing did not hesitate. “I would guess that over the course of my career, I’ve donated at least a million dollars in legal services,” he said. The hours behind that figure run into the thousands. He was candid that the motivation was not purely charitable. “Part of it is to be charitable, but part of it is also self-interested,” he said. “It helps me too. So it’s a win-win.”
It’s also why Mensing agreed to discuss the TRLA work at all. “There are commercial litigators, and there are commercial litigators that are trial lawyers first,” he said. “I just thought, ‘I don’t see anybody who’s done this.’” He draws the distinction deliberately: a commercial litigator can spend a career managing disputes toward settlement without ever standing in front of a jury, while a trial lawyer measures a career in verdicts, however they arrive.
From the Custody Docket to Corporate Clients
Mensing has built a practice trying commercial and intellectual property disputes for clients in energy, technology and other sectors, work that bears little surface resemblance to a custody trial in a courtroom without a paying client. He has tried more than 60 cases over his career, a trial count built in part on commercial matters and in part on unpaid work like the TRLA custody trial and the pro bono criminal defense cases he took on separately.
The connection between the unpaid work and the paying practice, in Mensing’s account, is not incidental. Clients hiring outside litigation counsel for a high-stakes dispute are, in effect, buying a lawyer’s accumulated trial judgment, and that judgment is built case by case rather than granted by a law degree or a title at a firm. A commercial litigator who has spent a career managing disputes toward settlement, without regularly standing in front of a jury, develops different instincts than one who has done what Mensing describes: taking unpaid custody and criminal trials specifically because they were trials, not because anyone was paying him to be there.
