Though he’s lived in Houston the past 20 years, Southwest Louisiana native Seth Hopkins said “his area code will always be 337 — in good times and bad.”
“That’s because we’re a community of smart, tough, honest people with unmatched resilience and, most importantly, stubbornness,” he said. “That can be a good thing sometimes.”
Hopkins — now a member of the Senior Leadership Team at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, the nation’s third-largest county attorney’s office — said that stubbornness is what led to him prevailing in the longest single-client Title II Americans with Disabilities Act case in history. The case, Covington v McNeese, ultimately lasted 12 years and led to Hopkins arguing three times to the Louisiana Supreme Court. It also resulted in the university being ordered to correct 15,000 ADA violations at a cost of nearly $14 million.
“The case that I’m most proud of that I ever worked on was right here in Lake Charles,” Hopkins told members of the Kiwanis Club of Lake Charles this week. “It was right after I got my license and it was a case, unfortunately, against McNeese. I went to McNeese, I love McNeese, I was part of the Governor’s Program and was the editor of the Contraband (student newspaper). The cast lingered 12 and a half years and it was over something that was simple — a bathroom door.”