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Reese Marketos LLP: The Dallas Trial Boutique That Beat Mercedes-Benz for $136 Million

Two years after three lawyers left big Dallas firms to open a fourteen-person shop with no litigation support department to speak of, they walked into a Texas courtroom against Mercedes-Benz USA and walked out with a $136 million jury verdict — at the time, the largest commercial litigation verdict in the state and one of the largest in the country that year. That single case is the fact this Dallas business litigation attorney firm, Reese Marketos LLP, is still introduced by, more than a decade later.

At a Glance: Dallas Business Litigation Attorney Firm Overview

Origin & Background

Reese Marketos LLP was founded in 2011 by Joel Reese, who left a partner position at Winstead PC, and Pete Marketos, who departed two years after making partner at Haynes and Boone, together with a third founding partner, Brad Gordon. All three brought associates from large Dallas firms with them, betting that a small, trial-focused team could out-prepare and outperform much larger opponents in the courtroom rather than compete with them on headcount. The firm has stated that no partner has left in its fifteen-year history, an unusually stable run for a litigation boutique of its size.

The wager was validated early: within two years of opening, the firm secured a $136 million jury verdict against Mercedes-Benz USA, which the firm and outside trade press have described as the largest commercial litigation verdict in Texas at the time. Reese has served as managing partner since the firm’s founding.

Practice Concentration: What This Dallas Business Litigation Attorney Firm Handles

The firm’s stated practice areas, as described on its own site, are complex commercial litigation, commercial fraud litigation, qui tam and False Claims Act litigation (including a growing whistleblower-side practice), patent litigation, and governmental litigation. Attorneys work across industries including energy, healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, and government contracting.

Mixed-representation disclosure: Reese Marketos represents both plaintiffs and defendants. The firm’s own materials state it represents “both plaintiffs and defendants in high-stakes cases involving commercial fraud, breach of contract, trade secrets, patent law, and more,” and Chambers USA specifically credits partner Pete Marketos for “handling of complex commercial litigation on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants.” In practice this means the firm may be retained by either side of a commercial dispute depending on the matter and the client, rather than exclusively representing businesses or exclusively representing those suing them — a distinction worth understanding before retaining any commercial litigation counsel, since it affects how a firm evaluates and strategizes a case.

Notable Work

Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case. Every matter is different, and the results above are specific to the facts and parties involved in each case as reported by the firm and independent trade press.

Client Voice

The firm does not maintain a visible consumer review profile on Google, Yelp, or Avvo — consistent with a boutique whose client base is almost entirely businesses, private equity sponsors, and individuals in high-dollar commercial disputes rather than the general public. That is a genuine gap in independently verifiable, arm’s-length consumer feedback, and it’s worth naming directly rather than treating the firm’s own published client statements as equivalent to it. With that caveat, testimonials collected by Legal 500 and published on the firm’s own site are attributed to named individuals: “All of the attorneys at Reese Marketos are great,” one Legal 500-sourced client stated, singling out named partners for “great legal work.” A retired Texas Supreme Court justice was quoted as saying he had worked with each of the firm’s partners “either on the same side or in opposition” since leaving the bench — a notable comment on the firm’s standing within the Texas commercial bar specifically, though it is not an independent consumer review.

Beyond the Courtroom

Pete Marketos is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only peer organization limited to a small percentage of the trial bar in any jurisdiction. The firm has built out a dedicated whistleblower practice within its qui tam/False Claims Act work, hiring a former Eastern District of Texas federal prosecutor — himself a former whistleblower — specifically to work with clients who are reporting fraud against the government, a practice area that requires a different kind of client counseling than adversarial commercial litigation.

Recognition

As a Dallas business litigation attorney firm, Reese Marketos has been ranked by Chambers USA in Litigation: General Commercial (Texas: Dallas, Fort Worth & Surrounds) for at least four consecutive years, with individual Chambers rankings for founding partners Joel Reese and Pete Marketos. The firm is also ranked by Legal 500 in Commercial Disputes (Boutique Firms). Multiple attorneys, including Reese, Marketos, and several partners, have been selected to Texas Super Lawyers. The firm was named a Law360 2025 Trials Practice Group of the Year. These are peer-reviewed and publication-based recognitions rather than firm self-description, and Chambers rankings in particular are based on structured interviews with clients and opposing counsel rather than submission alone. No attorney at the firm is presented on this profile as a Texas Board of Legal Specialization “specialist,” because that documentation was not located in this firm’s public materials; the recognitions above are peer-review and publication-based rather than state board certification.

Texas Legal Backdrop

Commercial disputes of the size Reese Marketos typically handles are now often eligible for Texas’s new Business Court system. Created by House Bill 19 and codified at Texas Government Code Chapter 25A, the Business Court began accepting cases on September 1, 2024, with the Dallas-area division (the First Division) among the first five to open. The Business Court has civil jurisdiction, concurrent with the state district courts, over qualifying disputes generally involving an amount in controversy of at least $5 million, including breach of fiduciary duty claims, corporate governance disputes, and alleged violations of the Texas Business & Commerce Code or Business Organizations Code. Appeals from Business Court judgments go to the newly created Fifteenth Court of Appeals rather than the regional courts of appeals that hear most other Texas civil appeals.

Underlying limitations periods still matter regardless of forum. Under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.004, claims for fraud and breach of fiduciary duty must generally be brought within four years of accrual. Trade secret misappropriation claims are governed by the Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act, codified at Texas Business & Commerce Code Chapter 134A. A party that prevails on a breach of contract claim may be entitled to recover reasonable attorney’s fees under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 38, a provision that shapes settlement leverage in commercial disputes throughout the state. This is general background information, not legal advice, and it does not account for the specific facts of any dispute.

Awesome Attorneys Assessment

As a Dallas business litigation attorney firm, Reese Marketos’s model is genuinely unusual in the Dallas market: fifteen years, no partner departures, and a deliberate refusal to grow past a size where every partner can be hands-on in trial preparation. The Mercedes-Benz verdict and the firm’s subsequent record of nine- and ten-figure results are independently reported, not just firm-claimed, which gives the track record more weight than a self-published results page alone would carry.

The honest trade-off is the same one that applies to any elite trial boutique: this is not a firm built for routine commercial disputes, modest-dollar contract fights, or clients who want a long-term general counsel relationship. The firm itself frames its work around “high-stakes” matters and is known in the market for being brought in on compressed timelines shortly before trial — a strength for a company already facing a bet-the-company case, and a mismatch for a business owner with a five-figure vendor dispute. The absence of any visible public consumer review trail is also worth weighing for anyone trying to evaluate the firm the way they’d evaluate a plaintiff-side consumer firm; the available record here is built from peer rankings, reported verdicts, and firm-published testimonials rather than independent aggregator reviews, and prospective clients should treat that distinction as a gap to ask about directly rather than assume it away.

Methodology & Sourcing

This profile was compiled from Reese Marketos LLP’s own website (rm-firm.com), Chambers USA and Chambers Profiles, Legal 500 rankings and client-quote pages, Super Lawyers attorney and firm profiles, Lawdragon editorial coverage of Joel Reese and Pete Marketos, D Magazine’s D CEO coverage of the firm’s whistleblower practice, and a search for independent consumer reviews on Yelp and comparable platforms (none of substance found as of this writing). Verdict and settlement figures are as reported by the firm and by independent trade and business press; where a figure could not be independently corroborated outside firm-published sources, that is noted in the Notable Work table.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys is an independently researched legal directory. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by Reese Marketos LLP prior to publication. Awesome Attorneys may in the future offer sponsored placement products to firms profiled on this site, but sponsorship status has no bearing on editorial content, and inclusion in this directory is not an endorsement of any firm for any particular legal matter. Nothing in this profile constitutes legal advice or a lawyer referral; readers with a legal question should consult a licensed Texas attorney directly.