Dallas boutique Burns Charest rose from the ashes of Houston-based national litigation powerhouse Susman Godfrey, which closed its Dallas office several years ago. Since then, the partners composing Burns Charest have increasingly burnished their individual and collective reputations in the city as a leaner and more nimble group with trial skills baked into its approach. “Burns Charest is a very good firm,” attests a local peer. “They do a lot more plaintiff work over there and have that same litigation pedigree they developed at Susman. They recently got a very good verdict against Sun Holdings!” This alluded-to matter, led by
Daniel Charest, dates from February 2024 and found a Dallas County jury awarding $30.7 million in damages to an individual Burns Charest client in a fraud case, in which the plaintiff claimed he had been defrauded by a Dallas-based franchisee and Sun Holdings after the plaintiff did not receive a share of operating profits from roughly 150 Popeyes franchise restaurants owned by the defendant throughout the South. More recently, in September 2025,
Darren Nicholson led a team that logged a $9.6 million verdict win in California federal court against American Airlines, finding that the crew of a flight from Miami to Madrid failed to follow policies and procedures when a passenger suffered a stroke shortly after takeoff in 2021. The passenger suffered debilitating injuries because American never diverted the plane, resulting in an eight-hour delay to accessible stroke treatment.
