Barry Barnett

Susman Godfrey L.L.P.

Clients and colleagues call Barry Barnett an “incredibly gifted lawyer” (Chambers and Partners) who is “magic in the courtroom” (Who’s Who Legal). In 2020 and 2021, Lawdragon named him one of the 500 “best of the best” lawyers in the United States. And Best Lawyers honored him as “Lawyer of the Year” in Houston for Bet-the-Company Litigation (2019 and 2017) and Patent Litigation (2020). With offices in Dallas, Houston, and New York, he has successfully navigated complex matters for  sophisticated business clients across the United States for more than three decades.

Trial counsel Barnett’s credentials match his knowledge and skill. The son of a Texas roughneck and grandson of a Texas sharecropper, he is a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, an Elected Member of the American Law Institute, and an honors graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. With 35 years of trial and appellate work representing both plaintiffs and defendants, he is a master strategist and nimble tactician in complex disputes.

Barnett focuses on enforcement of antitrust laws, the Magna Carta of free enterprise, in Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s memorable phrase. He is also adept in energy and intellectual property matters and has battled for clients against a Who’s Who list of corporate  behemoths, including Abbott Labs, Alcoa, Apple, AT&T, BlackBerry, Broadcom, Comcast, Dow, JPMorgan Chase, Samsung, and Visa. Barnett projects a compelling courtroom presence. His performance before the Supreme Court in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend prompted the Court to withdraw the question on which it had granted review. The judge in a trial involving mobile phone technology called him “one of the best” and his opening statement the finest he had ever seen. Another trial judge told Barnett minutes after a jury returned a favorable verdict against the county’s most powerful manufacturer that he was one of the two best trial lawyers he’d ever come across—adding that the other one was dead.

Barnett focuses on enforcement of antitrust laws, the Magna Carta of free enterprise, in Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s memorable phrase. He is also adept in energyand intellectual property matters and has battled for clients against a Who’s Who list of corporate behemoths, including Abbott Labs, Alcoa, Apple, AT&T, BlackBerry, Broadcom, Comcast, Dow, JPMorgan Chase, Samsung, and Visa.