Nor did Buzbee have a lot of love growing up in the small, rural north Texas town of Atlanta. His father worked as a butcher at a local grocery and his mother worked in the school cafeteria.
A hard-scrabble upbringing. His father, he says, would fight at the drop of a hat – and usually be the one to drop it – and Buzbee would frequently be the object of his temper. “Big and mean,” he says. “Everybody knew him in town. Still do, and he’s 81.”
On days when he wasn’t working, he’d tell Buzbee to “get in the truck, boy”, and they’d drive the dirt roads around town looking for discarded beer cans. “He’d slow down, I’d jump out, pick up a can, throw it in the back and we’d keep going. We’d do that for hours.” After selling the aluminum, his father would retire to his favourite bar to drink and play pool with his buddies, while Buzbee sat in the corner watching. “He wrestled a bear once,’ he says, ‘and fought a dwarf”.
He did what?
“I saw it happen.” One day there was a dwarf in the bar who was drunk and who took it into his head to needle Buzbee’s father when he was shooting pool, jogging his arm when he went to make a shot.
“My dad took pool super-serious, and he got annoyed pretty quick. When my dad said ‘hey’, the dwarf kicked him on the shin. My dad has really skinny legs, hardly any fat on them. He saw stars and he just went ‘whack! and knocked the dwarf into the wall.”
And the bear?
There was a man, he says, who would travel the small towns in the area with a muzzled bear, charging people $20 to wrestle with it, just to prove they could. ‘Nobody could beat the bear. My dad wrestled it, and the bear beat him easily.” Buzbee laughs.
Deepwater Horizon
At the age of 17, Buzbee graduated from high school, “and I was out of there. Tried to get as far away as I could.” He attended college on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, and went to serve in the Marines, spending four years in the Middle East, Kenya and Somalia and rising to the rank of lieutenant.
Wondering what to do in the future, on a ship sailing off the coast of India he picked up a friend’s preparatory law school handbook and started answering questions and found he was pretty good at it. “And I said, hey boys, I’m going to go to law school.”
He shakes his head and laughs. “The weird things that happen to you.”
He enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, and in 1997 graduated summa cum laude, then joined one of Houston’s biggest law firms, but left after a year. “I decided, I don’t want to keep making the managing partners richer so I’m going to try to do it myself.”
He set up with a partner in an office in a suburban strip mall, handling personal injury cases for oil-rig workers; he took to it, he says, like a duck to water. “With my working-class background I could bond with those guys really easily. And if you have access to one guy you have access to 25 others – cousins, brothers, whatever; something happens in their family and they call you.”
His first major case was an anti-trust violation. Reading through “a truckload” of depositions in a case against a drilling company he came upon evidence that nobody else seemed to have noticed, that companies were sharing information on employees’ wages to keep them rigged low. He told his partner they should pursue the case. When his partner hesitated, Buzbee took out two lines of credit to pursue it on his own, and within a year had collected $75 million in settlements from various drilling companies. “If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million.”
Among the settlements was $15 million from the law firm he had been working for the year before, and who were representing one of the defendants. The case was a class action, meaning he had to make an application to the judge for a fee. He was awarded $18.6 million.
His biggest wins have come from actions against BP. In 2005 a BP plant blew up in Texas city, killing 15 workers and injuring a further 180. Buzbee represented 1,400 people and ended up settling for just under $500 million.
In 2010 he filed another lawsuit representing more than 10,000 individuals and businesses, following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling platform that killed 11 workers and injured 17 others, and which caused an oil spill that spread across the Gulf of Mexico, devastating wildlife, and contaminating beaches, wetlands and estuaries. BP would end up paying $20.8 billion in damages for the spill, the largest environmental damage settlement in US history.
The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig started one of the worst environmental disasters in history Credit: U.S. Coast Guard via AP
Buzbee remembers that in the midst of the case he applied for a deposition to take testimony from the CEO of BP, Lord Browne, “who I was very excited to meet for obvious reasons.
“I went to my ranch and I received a call from the general counsel of BP. He said, it looks like you got the deposition you wanted. I said, yes, I did. I’d already taken a lot of BP money at that point. There were 85 cases I’d already settled.
“He said, well, we’d like to settle all your cases. I told him we could discuss it, and I’d be back in town on Tuesday. He said, no I don’t think you understand. We want to settle all your cases today. I said, I’m at my ranch and, s–t man, I don’t even know who I represent.
“He asked me how long it would take to get a list. I said, call me back in two hours. I had my assistant go to my office and fax me a list of clients, their injuries and their medical treatments. At hour two I was parked in my Jeep at the highest point of my ranch where I could get a signal, with a pen and paper and I said, let’s go.
“And in two and half hours we resolved 185 cases. It was like, ‘Tom Jones…. John Smith…’ He said, ‘We’ll give you four million on that.’ I said, ‘Well make it six.’ ‘OK, we’ll give you five and half.’ ‘OK, done.’”
“When I hung up I drove back to my ranch house and sat in the front yard in my Jeep, trying to add all this up on the calculator on my cell phone. I went in and said to my wife, ‘Goddam, I just settled all my BP cases.’ She said, ‘That’s awesome, how did you do?’ I said, ‘I think it’s something over 300 million but I’ve got to add it up again.’
“And that was as close as I got to meeting Lord Browne.”
Buzbee wants to smoke a cigar, so we move to his study – the only room in the house, he says with a rueful smile, where his wife will let him smoke. He settles in a chair and ignites a truncheon-sized Romeo Y Julieta.
He and Frances married in 2021. It is his second marriage. He was divorced from his first wife Zoe Benson, his college sweetheart and the mother of his four children, in 2017 after 26 years of marriage: “I was not a good husband, but I was a good father.”
Frances Moody is 24 years his junior, a daughter of one of the pre-eminent families in Texas with extensive interests in banking, insurance and hotels. Buzbee served on a bank board with her father for 10 years, and once sued her grandfather over an employment issue.
Did you win? “Well, he paid me.”
A hard-scrabble upbringing. His father, he says, would fight at the drop of a hat – and usually be the one to drop it – and Buzbee would frequently be the object of his temper. “Big and mean,” he says. “Everybody knew him in town. Still do, and he’s 81.”
On days when he wasn’t working, he’d tell Buzbee to “get in the truck, boy”, and they’d drive the dirt roads around town looking for discarded beer cans. “He’d slow down, I’d jump out, pick up a can, throw it in the back and we’d keep going. We’d do that for hours.” After selling the aluminum, his father would retire to his favourite bar to drink and play pool with his buddies, while Buzbee sat in the corner watching. “He wrestled a bear once,’ he says, ‘and fought a dwarf”.
He did what?
“I saw it happen.” One day there was a dwarf in the bar who was drunk and who took it into his head to needle Buzbee’s father when he was shooting pool, jogging his arm when he went to make a shot.
“My dad took pool super-serious, and he got annoyed pretty quick. When my dad said ‘hey’, the dwarf kicked him on the shin. My dad has really skinny legs, hardly any fat on them. He saw stars and he just went ‘whack! and knocked the dwarf into the wall.”
And the bear?
There was a man, he says, who would travel the small towns in the area with a muzzled bear, charging people $20 to wrestle with it, just to prove they could. ‘Nobody could beat the bear. My dad wrestled it, and the bear beat him easily.” Buzbee laughs.
Deepwater Horizon
At the age of 17, Buzbee graduated from high school, “and I was out of there. Tried to get as far away as I could.” He attended college on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, and went to serve in the Marines, spending four years in the Middle East, Kenya and Somalia and rising to the rank of lieutenant.
Wondering what to do in the future, on a ship sailing off the coast of India he picked up a friend’s preparatory law school handbook and started answering questions and found he was pretty good at it. “And I said, hey boys, I’m going to go to law school.”
He shakes his head and laughs. “The weird things that happen to you.”
He enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, and in 1997 graduated summa cum laude, then joined one of Houston’s biggest law firms, but left after a year. “I decided, I don’t want to keep making the managing partners richer so I’m going to try to do it myself.”
He set up with a partner in an office in a suburban strip mall, handling personal injury cases for oil-rig workers; he took to it, he says, like a duck to water. “With my working-class background I could bond with those guys really easily. And if you have access to one guy you have access to 25 others – cousins, brothers, whatever; something happens in their family and they call you.”
His first major case was an anti-trust violation. Reading through “a truckload” of depositions in a case against a drilling company he came upon evidence that nobody else seemed to have noticed, that companies were sharing information on employees’ wages to keep them rigged low. He told his partner they should pursue the case. When his partner hesitated, Buzbee took out two lines of credit to pursue it on his own, and within a year had collected $75 million in settlements from various drilling companies. “If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million.”
Among the settlements was $15 million from the law firm he had been working for the year before, and who were representing one of the defendants. The case was a class action, meaning he had to make an application to the judge for a fee. He was awarded $18.6 million.
His biggest wins have come from actions against BP. In 2005 a BP plant blew up in Texas city, killing 15 workers and injuring a further 180. Buzbee represented 1,400 people and ended up settling for just under $500 million.
In 2010 he filed another lawsuit representing more than 10,000 individuals and businesses, following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling platform that killed 11 workers and injured 17 others, and which caused an oil spill that spread across the Gulf of Mexico, devastating wildlife, and contaminating beaches, wetlands and estuaries. BP would end up paying $20.8 billion in damages for the spill, the largest environmental damage settlement in US history.
The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig started one of the worst environmental disasters in history Credit: U.S. Coast Guard via AP
Buzbee remembers that in the midst of the case he applied for a deposition to take testimony from the CEO of BP, Lord Browne, “who I was very excited to meet for obvious reasons.
“I went to my ranch and I received a call from the general counsel of BP. He said, it looks like you got the deposition you wanted. I said, yes, I did. I’d already taken a lot of BP money at that point. There were 85 cases I’d already settled.
“He said, well, we’d like to settle all your cases. I told him we could discuss it, and I’d be back in town on Tuesday. He said, no I don’t think you understand. We want to settle all your cases today. I said, I’m at my ranch and, s–t man, I don’t even know who I represent.
“He asked me how long it would take to get a list. I said, call me back in two hours. I had my assistant go to my office and fax me a list of clients, their injuries and their medical treatments. At hour two I was parked in my Jeep at the highest point of my ranch where I could get a signal, with a pen and paper and I said, let’s go.
“And in two and half hours we resolved 185 cases. It was like, ‘Tom Jones…. John Smith…’ He said, ‘We’ll give you four million on that.’ I said, ‘Well make it six.’ ‘OK, we’ll give you five and half.’ ‘OK, done.’”
“When I hung up I drove back to my ranch house and sat in the front yard in my Jeep, trying to add all this up on the calculator on my cell phone. I went in and said to my wife, ‘Goddam, I just settled all my BP cases.’ She said, ‘That’s awesome, how did you do?’ I said, ‘I think it’s something over 300 million but I’ve got to add it up again.’
“And that was as close as I got to meeting Lord Browne.”
Buzbee wants to smoke a cigar, so we move to his study – the only room in the house, he says with a rueful smile, where his wife will let him smoke. He settles in a chair and ignites a truncheon-sized Romeo Y Julieta.
He and Frances married in 2021. It is his second marriage. He was divorced from his first wife Zoe Benson, his college sweetheart and the mother of his four children, in 2017 after 26 years of marriage: “I was not a good husband, but I was a good father.”
Frances Moody is 24 years his junior, a daughter of one of the pre-eminent families in Texas with extensive interests in banking, insurance and hotels. Buzbee served on a bank board with her father for 10 years, and once sued her grandfather over an employment issue.
Did you win? “Well, he paid me.”