Winstead PC: The Dallas Firm Doing “Bet-the-Company” IP Litigation Since 1973

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At a Glance

Origin & Founder History

Winstead PC was founded in Dallas in 1973 and has grown into one of Texas’s larger homegrown corporate law firms, expanding during the late 1980s to more than 170 attorneys with additional offices in Houston and Austin, later adding Fort Worth, San Antonio, and out-of-state locations including Charlotte, Nashville, New York, and Washington, D.C. The firm relocated its Dallas headquarters to Uptown’s North Harwood Street in 2012 after 25 years at Renaissance Tower, taking eight of ten floors in its new building — a scale of commitment reflecting the firm’s continued Dallas anchor even as it expanded regionally and nationally.

Practice Concentration

Winstead’s IP group functions, in the firm’s own description, as “a nimble IP boutique practice” operating inside a large-firm infrastructure — meaning it can move at entrepreneur speed for smaller clients while also scaling quickly for large litigation and tight-deadline prosecutions. The practice covers patent, trademark, and copyright preparation and prosecution both domestically and internationally, particularly in Asia and Europe, alongside trade secret counseling and litigation. Phillip Philbin, who chairs the firm’s Business Litigation Practice Group, is a Chambers-recognized trial attorney with what Chambers describes as significant experience handling “bet-the-company” cases involving a wide variety of IP concerns — litigation where the outcome genuinely threatens a client’s core business, not routine disputes.

Track Record

Cathryn Berryman, another named IP partner, focuses on copyright and trademark work advising nonprofit organizations, healthcare providers, and start-ups — a client mix reflecting the firm’s IP practice serving both large corporate clients and smaller, mission-driven organizations. Chambers USA specifically credits the firm’s trademark and copyright group with handling both contentious and non-contentious matters across a diverse client industry range.

Client Voice

Chambers USA’s independently gathered client feedback describes Winstead’s IP advisers as “very thoughtful” and “easy to work with.” One respondent specifically praised the team as “more thorough and in-depth than anyone I’ve worked with,” and singled out Cathryn Berryman for making technical matters “easy to interact with” for non-technical clients like nonprofits and healthcare providers. Phillip Philbin was separately described by a Chambers respondent as “a great communicator, responsive and is very practical.”

Beyond the Courtroom

Winstead’s Dallas office alone has attorneys recognized across a notably broad set of Best Law Firms categories — commercial litigation, copyright law, corporate law, employment law, insurance law, litigation/construction, litigation/intellectual property, litigation/patent, mergers and acquisitions, patent law, sports law, technology law, and trademark law — reflecting the depth of practice areas available under one roof for a client whose matter touches multiple legal disciplines simultaneously, a genuine advantage of a full-service firm this size.

Recognition

Chambers USA independently ranks Winstead’s Intellectual Property: Trademark, Copyright & Trade Secrets practice in Texas, a research-driven ranking based on client interviews and peer assessment rather than self-submission. 143 Winstead Dallas attorneys have been individually selected to Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists across the firm’s various practices. These are attributed to Chambers and Super Lawyers as the respective conferring organizations.

Texas Legal Backdrop

“Bet-the-company” IP litigation — the category Phillip Philbin is specifically noted for — refers to cases where an adverse outcome could threaten a company’s core operations or existence, distinct from routine infringement disputes with contained financial exposure; the stakes shape both litigation strategy and settlement posture differently than in a standard commercial dispute. International patent prosecution, another firm specialty, typically proceeds either through direct national filings in each target country or through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which allows a single international application to preserve filing dates across many member countries before national-phase entry deadlines. None of this is legal advice; a business considering international patent protection or facing high-stakes IP litigation should consult counsel about the specific strategic considerations.

Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Winstead’s differentiator is a genuinely rare combination for a firm this size: Chambers-verified client testimonials specifically praising both technical clarity and litigation practicality, a 50-plus-year Dallas institutional history, and enough scale (307 firmwide attorneys, offices across multiple states) to handle “bet-the-company” litigation while its IP group still operates with boutique-style responsiveness according to independently gathered client feedback.

The honest trade-off is that a firm of Winstead’s scale and full-service structure will generally carry higher rates than a dedicated small IP boutique, and a startup or individual inventor with a single, modest trademark or patent filing may find a smaller practice more cost-effective for that specific, limited need. For a business facing high-stakes IP litigation, needing international patent protection, or wanting IP counsel embedded within a full-service firm capable of handling adjacent corporate, employment, or real estate matters simultaneously, Winstead’s scale and documented client satisfaction are genuine, independently verified assets.

Methodology & Sourcing

This profile was compiled from the firm’s own website (winstead.com and winsteadonline.com), including its IP litigation, IP transactional, and Dallas office pages, Chambers USA’s independently researched IP: Trademark, Copyright & Trade Secrets Texas rankings and client-feedback profiles, Super Lawyers Dallas firm listings, The Texas Lawbook’s coverage of the firm’s 2012 headquarters relocation, and Wikipedia’s firm history entry. Client-feedback quotations are drawn from Chambers’ independently gathered interviews, not the firm’s own marketing copy.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

This profile is an independent editorial article published by Awesome Attorneys. Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any lawyer or law firm profiled on this site, and inclusion in this series is not paid placement. Facts in this profile were researched from public sources as described in the Methodology & Sourcing section and are current only as of the research date.