Greenberg Traurig is bolstering its litigation practice in Dallas with a group of shareholders led by Mike Gruber.
Joining Gruber are Brian Mason and Christina Carroll. The trio were previously at Dorsey & Whitney and started at GT on Thursday.
In March, Gruber and Mason helped Ackerman McQueen reach a settlement with the National Rifle Association in a high-profile lawsuit that nearly wrecked the advertising firm’s longtime client. The multi-year fight between the two spawned lawsuits filed in New York and Texas and included a New York attorney general’s investigation into the NRA and a failed bankruptcy bid by the gun rights advocacy group in the Northern District of Texas.
Joe Coniglio, managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig’s Dallas office, said the new hires are the “top legal talent we are looking for.”
“Mike is right in the middle of the most significant litigation matters in Texas and is dedicated to the Dallas community,” said Coniglio, noting Gruber’s leadership as chairman of the Southern Gateway Project. “We are feeling like the wind is behind our backs coming up on our 20th year in Texas.”
Before his four-plus year tenure at Dorsey, Gruber, a Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law grad, practiced for a dozen years at the litigation boutique he co-founded.
As Gruber and his team were being courted by a number of different firms, he said Greenberg Traurig’s combination of “enormous resources and very entrepreneurial way of practicing law” was the difference maker. Plus, there was familiarity with lawyers at GT they had worked with or trained before.
Mason, who also received his law degree from SMU and has practiced with Gruber since 2015, added that the “leadership here has been unbelievably impressive,” pointing specifically to Coniglio and Peter Wahby.
Carroll, who clerked for Gruber’s litigation firm while studying at Duke University and started her career there after graduating, said she is excited to join a firm “where diversity is not a goal but is the standard.”
Mason and Carroll are both young shareholders. They made partner at Dorsey in 2021 and 2022, respectively.