Kathy Patrick, partner at Gibbs & Bruns premier litigation boutique in Houston, has been named to the Daily Journal‘s 2024 list of “Leading Commercial Litigators.”
Kathy is one of the US’s leading trial lawyers and is both a Fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers and a new Inductee of The American College of Trial Lawyers; both are invitation-only organizations whose trial lawyer members have demonstrated the highest standards of trial advocacy, professionalism, and ethical standards throughout their respective careers.
Kathy’s cases run the gamut of high profile, high dollar, and high risk cases:
- Forbes profiled Kathy as “the woman Wall Street fears most” for her recovery of over $20 billion in cash and additional billions in mortgage servicing reforms for 14 institutional investors in Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) from some of the largest financial institutions in America, including Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Residential Capital, and Lehman Brothers in the wake of the financial crisis.
- Kathy’s $8.5 billion settlement deal with Bank of America in 2011 was the second-biggest civil settlement in history, second only to the tobacco settlements, and was approved after a nine-week trial in New York Supreme Court.
- The Financial Times named Kathy one of its “Top 10 Agents for Change” in the US in its 2012 Innovative Lawyers special edition, citing her groundbreaking portfolio of successes on behalf of major institutional investors.
- Kathy secured a $1.7 billion mid-trial settlement package for Huntsman Corporation in a tortious interference and fraud case against Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, including $1.1 billion in financing and $632 million in cash. This was the largest cash settlement every recovered for a busted leveraged buyout.
- From 2001 to 2007, Kathy led the Gibbs & Bruns team in representing the Outside Directors of Enron’s Board in defending over 100 cases and related regulatory investigations that arose from Enron’s collapse, working closely with her partner Robin Gibbs. When interviewed by AmLaw in January 2009 about this key settlement result for this group of clients, Kathy shared, “We don’t have a professional distance from our clients. For us, this is personal.”
- In the summer of 2022 and 2023, she led the trial of a twelve-week, two-phase arbitration resulting in an interim award rejecting $900 million in claims for damages against her client arising from the Bayou Corne Sinkhole in Louisiana and a significant victory on her client’s counterclaim for specific performance.
Kathy’s accolades include recognition as a “Leading Trial Lawyer” in Legal 500, a “Star Individual” in Chambers USA, as well as multiple rankings in Benchmark Litigation, Best Lawyers in America, Lawdragon, and Texas Super Lawyers.
