Fifth Court of Appeals

Place 12

Justice Mike Lee was elected to the Fifth District Court of Appeals on November 5, 2024. Justice Lee previously served as Presiding Judge of the 95th District Court, a civil district court in Dallas County, and as Presiding Judge of the 256th District Court, a family district court also in Dallas County.

Justice Lee’s service on the bench follows more than 35 years in private litigation practice, with experience representing clients in tort, contract, and commercial cases, juvenile delinquency and criminal litigation, and family law cases in courtrooms across the State of Texas. His experience included some 70 jury trials in state and federal courts, and he handled two dozen appeals to the Texas courts of appeals, the Supreme Court of Texas, and the Fifth Circuit. Justice Lee is licensed in the Fifth Circuit and in the United States District Courts for the Northern, Eastern and Southern Districts of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Bar College and is a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation.

Justice Lee comes to the court from The Willis Law Group, a national litigation firm headquartered in Garland, where he served as Senior Counsel. As part of his duties, he was responsible for training the firm’s associates and regularly presented accredited continuing education seminars for the firm’s attorneys. Justice Lee spent the fifteen years prior to his first appointment to the bench with Erwin A. Cain, P.C., a litigation boutique in Dallas and Sulphur Springs, where he handled the North Texas litigation for a national retail chain and assisted in overseeing the litigation nationwide for an interstate refrigerated trucking company.

Justice Lee graduated with honors from the University of Texas School of Law in 1985, where he was a member of the Board of Advocates. His undergraduate degree was received from the University of Dallas, where he was a three-year letterman on the intercollegiate baseball team and served as editor-in-chief of the university newspaper.

Justice Lee is active in the attorney wellness movement within the Texas Bar. He has served as one of the three Trustees of the Patrick D. Sheeran and Michael J. Crowley Memorial Trust (the “Sheeran Crowley Wellness Trust”) since 1999. He has been a member of Texas Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers since 1994, has served as the organization's President and as its Convention Chair, and is the 2010 recipient of that organization’s Ralph A. Mock Memorial Award, “for enduring contribution to Texas Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers.” He has also served as a volunteer for the Texas Lawyers Assistance Program since 1994. Judge Lee last found it necessary to take a drink of alcohol on September 9, 1993; he has been sober since that date.

He is also active within his church, Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dallas, having served twenty years as a member of the parochial school board and a term as Chair of the Parish Council.  Justice Lee and his wife of 38 years, Linda, have two children and, so far, two grandchildren. Their daughter is an attorney in Greenville, SC; their son is a public school teacher in Boston, MA.