Circa 1940s. A boy from Hawaii meets a girl from Mexico over checker games at a  downtown park in Los Angeles. They get married. A typical romance a la America.

In the parlance of the Korean diaspora to North America, however, it was a karmic moment that grandchildren of two lost tribes in serfdom — one from the Yucatan territory’s henequen plantations and the other from the Hawaii sugar plantations — have at last come together in their continuing search for the lofty American Dream.

The auspicious merging of the Yucatan Kim and Hawaii Halm families through the marriage of Julia Kim and Richard Halm has spawned a pair of first cousins who would each produce far-ranging precedents in the frontiers of American jurisprudence.

Meet cousins Howard Lee Halm, a partner with the nation’s largest civil defense litigation firm and past president of major Asian American bar associations, and Willard K. Halm, the only son born to Richard and Julia, pioneering in surrogacy, parental rights, and egg and sperm donation law fields. Both grew up together in Los Angeles, with Will looking up to Howard as a role model  since his father died in his early childhood.

In his 40-year trail of countless courtroom battles, the Oahu native has piled up the awesome record of winning 33 jury trials in state and federal courts and binding arbitrations with mass toxic torts, asbestos cancer, wrongful death and brain injury cases.

He has served on numerous state and American bar committees as well as speaker on trial practices and civil litigation. He is a member of the prestigious American Board of Trial Advocates.

With a law degree from the University of San Diego Law School after attending UC Berkeley and UCLA, he spent his first five years as a deputy state attorney general in the Los Angeles office trying a dozen civil jury trials and defending three dozens criminal appeals.

What followed was nothing short of a spectacular series. In defense of the state and one of its safety inspectors, he was involved in the Sylmar Lockheed Tunnel cases. It was then the largest civil trial in the state involving 16 deaths resulting from a methane gas explosion while building a tunnel for the California Aqueduct. “In this case, I was able to gain significant experience working with the best civil trial lawyers of the 1970s,” he recalled.

As a result, he was recruited by Joe Cummins’ firm of Cummins, White & Breidenbach. “This association allowed me to work with many great lawyers and, 20 years later, my partners added my name to the letterhead.”

Then a 1989 telephone call from his old client, the State of California, led to the next engagement: the nation’s biggest environmental tort case in the one-year jury trial of the Newman v. Stringfellow case in 1993.

The Stringfellow litigation grew out of damage allegedly caused by the toxic waste dump in Riverside County, with 5,000 people suing the state for $800 million for cancer, deaths and respiratory illness. “Three years later, we concluded a one-year trial of 17 test cases resulting in awards of nine zero damages and eight damages totaling $159,000. The defense result caused plaintiffs to settle about a year later for zero sum from the state and a contribution from the state’s insurance carrier to avoid further defense costs,” Howard recalled.