Robert William Austin

Robert William Austin was a prominent Las Vegas trial attorney whose career in the city spanned four decades. Born August 16, 1922, in LaJunta, Colorado, he was raised in McGill, Nevada, and moved to Las Vegas for his senior year of high school, playing center on the 1939 Las Vegas High football team. As a teenager he had worked as a mucker in a mine. When World War II broke out he joined the Navy and was sent to officer's training school; serving as an ensign aboard a destroyer, he suffered a facial wound during a kamikaze attack near Okinawa. He later served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during the Korean War. He earned his law degree at the University of Texas Law School and returned to Las Vegas to practice.

Austin was with the firm of Morse & Graves in the early 1960s, maintained a solo practice in the late 1960s, and founded Austin & Thorndal in the 1970s. Following a five-year hiatus during which he studied geological science at the University of Utah, he started Lyles & Austin in the 1980s. The firm he co-founded as Austin & Thorndal grew into Thorndal, Armstrong, Delk, Balkenbush & Eisinger, one of Nevada's top insurance law firms. He practiced until his retirement in the early 1990s.

Over his career Austin worked on cases ranging from auto accidents to high-profile litigation. His early work anchored the Baneberry radiation case, which stemmed from a December 19, 1970, underground nuclear blast at the Nevada Test Site that vented radiation and exposed 900 workers - a matter that, with appeals, went on for 20 years. With partner George Lyles, he represented insurers involved in the 1980 MGM fire, the 1981 Las Vegas Hilton fire, and the 1988 PEPCON rocket fuel plant explosion near Henderson. Colleagues remembered him as a skillful trial lawyer and a formidable adversary who influenced a generation of local attorneys. Robert William Austin died at his Las Vegas home on February 8, 2004, at the age of 81, of leukemia.