Kim Cook Smith

With the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese forces swiftly moved in to seize the city. At just eighteen months old, I—along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees—was forced to flee my homeland in April 1975. My American father refused to leave without me or my Vietnamese mother. In the chaos of mass evacuation, we boarded a military cargo plane with nothing but the clothes on our backs as the Vietnam War ended and a communist regime took hold. Looking back over four decades, I realize that my journey was shaped not by chance but by fate. I am incredibly fortunate to have escaped a war-torn country and built the life I have today. In elementary school, I was enrolled in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes since Vietnamese was my first and only language. Over time, I lost the ability to speak it fluently, though I still understand most conversational Vietnamese. After graduating high school in Houston, I attended Texas A&M University in College Station, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English Rhetoric. Initially, I thought I would become a veterinarian, but three years in, I realized that path wasn’t for me. That realization led me to law school at Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston, where I graduated early and became licensed to practice law in Texas in May 2000. I began my legal career in Workers’ Compensation with The Law Firm of Adam Henderson in Houston. After four years, we expanded into the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where I established our DFW location under the Law Office of Henderson & Kroenung. In 2008, we made a mutual business decision to part ways, and I continued my practice as The Wyatt Law Firm, focusing exclusively on Workers’ Compensation. Somewhere between my time at Texas A&M and running my own law firm, I was blessed with six wonderful children—five boys and one little girl—who continue to be my greatest joy.