Houston’s Fierce Superlawyer Who Battles Celebrities Like Diddy and Deshaun Watson — Here’s What Fuels His Relentless Fire!
“When somebody says there’s a shark in the water, everybody runs.” Leaning back in his chair with his brown leather boots propped up on the desk, Tony Buzbee gazes out the window of his office on the seventy-fifth floor of the tallest building in Texas, basking in his own personal shark tank.
The feisty, flamboyant personal-injury attorney is more than a little obsessed with the ocean’s scariest hunters. His cavernous workspace here in downtown Houston is decorated with gold sharks, silver sharks, a marble shark sculpture, and shark-shaped doorknobs. And he’s quick to pull up his shirtsleeve to show me the shark tattoo on his right forearm. His private jet even has a shark decoration on the tail.
If we’re being honest, there are a few too many sharks. But for Buzbee, the excess is intentional. He didn’t get to be one of the wealthiest, most famous, and most feared lawyers in the country through subtlety. Over the past quarter century, Buzbee, fifty-seven, has financially feasted to the tune of roughly $15 billion in settlements and verdicts against big corporations, oil giants, and, more recently, celebrities and athletes accused of sexual assault. He has sued NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson and music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and was recently sued himself by Jay-Z, though the case was later dismissed. The willingness to take on any adversary is part of his formula.
“It’s hard to be critical of a shark, because he doesn’t care,” he says, laughing through his nasally East Texas accent, “and he might kill you if he chooses to.”
This is Buzbee in a snap—boisterous and showy, charming and disarming, but also capable of disemboweling you in court and publicly embarrassing you to reporters.
When I stopped by on a recent Wednesday morning, Buzbee was sporting a Texas beach-chic look, with a faded bronze tan, a foam-green suit, longish hair slicked back and tucked behind his ears, and a dress shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He was also riding high after winning a $640 million verdict against one of the country’s biggest crane companies in a wrongful-death case—among the largest such jury awards in the history of Texas. Basically, just another day in the life of the legal world’s deadliest shark.
Whenever disaster has struck in the past twenty-five years, Buzbee has expected to get a call. But the Marine-turned-litigator’s profile ascended to new heights when he successfully represented more than ten thousand clients against BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, resulting in his firm collecting more than $500 million from the oil behemoth. “I made more than a hundred millionaires in the BP case—like, legit millionaires,” he says, adding that he collects about 40 percent of the settlement totals in all cases.
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