Baker Botts L.L.P.

Litigation

Partner

I have been a trial lawyer for 28 years. I started my career trying cases in Houston, Texas, and now work out of Washington, D.C. But I have handled cases in state and Federal courts in 13 states. And I have represented both plaintiffs and defendants in cases involving thousands to billions of dollars.

As a plaintiff, I represented a media company in a $1 billion+ breach of warranty and Rule 10b-5 securities fraud case against a Paris-based media and telecommunications company. By the time of trial in New York, my team and I had taken ~60 depositions in Paris, London, Morocco, and throughout the U.S. The trial lasted four weeks and involved numerous complex financial and accounting issues that implicated subsidiaries of the French company in France, Morocco, and the U.S. under French and U.S. GAAP accounting rules. We won a unanimous plaintiff’s jury verdict and judgment by the Court in 2013 for €944 million Euros (at the time, over $1B). I was named American Lawyer's "Litigator of the Week," and the verdict was recently named as the largest verdict for a fraud case in New York over the last decade by the New York Law Journal. (Liberty Media Corp. et al. v. Vivendi Universal, S.A. In the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (2013)). The case settled for a (publicly disclosed) amount of $775 million.

As a defendant, I have tried multiple cases, including the dismissal of a $1 billion trade secret case after four weeks of trial for which I was again named as American Lawyer's "Litigator of the Week" in February 2015. (Moncrief Oil International, Inc. v. OAO Gazprom, et al. In the 17th District Court of Tarrant County, Texas (2015)).

We also look for ways to resolve a case prior to trial. Just recently, we won two consolidated cases on summary judgment motions for a client in significant subprime mortgage putback cases in the SDNY after years of litigation. These rulings were upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in February 2022. (Homeward Residential, Inc. v. Sand Canyon Corp. In the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York; and In the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2020, 2022)). Whether a case goes to trial or not, I believe in a relatively small team approach, using our understanding of both sides of the docket and years of experience to try to get to where the client is trying to go.

District of Columbia Bar

State Bar of Texas

United States Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Federal Circuits

United States District Court for the District of Columbia

United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of Texas

M.B.A., London Business School 2002

J.D., The University of Texas School of Law 1992 with honors

B.A., History, Yale University 1989