He said the most useful thing about this trade in eight words. “Litigators think about lawsuits. Trial lawyers try them.” Fred Bartlit is here for the difference.
He was born in Harvey, Illinois, on August 1, 1932, took an engineering degree at West Point, and spent eight years in the Army, part of it with the Rangers, before he went to law school at the University of Illinois, where he finished first in the class of 1960 and edited the law review. He joined Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago in 1963, as a first-year associate paid about a thousand dollars a year less than the fellow first-years from Harvard, Yale and Chicago, and stayed until 1993. In 1974 he defended General Motors in a criminal antitrust trial over fleet sales in which the company had been indicted, and won an acquittal on every count; he tried the Piper Alpha litigation in Scotland after the North Sea platform burned; he argued two price-fixing cases in the Supreme Court; he was counsel to the federal court in the Greylord judicial bribery investigation; in the fall of 2000 he was called from his daughter’s wedding to Tallahassee to try the election contest, and later said he would not put that case in his top ten; and in 2010 a president chose him as chief counsel to the national commission on the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf. By his firm’s count he tried more than seventy cases in more than twenty-four states, the Virgin Islands and Scotland. He died on August 6, 2026, at ninety-four.
The firm is the part a plaintiff’s lawyer should study. In 1993, at sixty-one, when a man in his position was expected to be collecting a partnership draw and giving speeches, he left Kirkland with nine partners and eleven associates to start Bartlit Beck, and the trade press described a firm that “has staked its very existence on ending time-based fees without losing money in the process.” His complaint was an engineer’s: the law business “ought to be the best way in the world to make a living,” he said, adding that instead it is the most inefficient industry in the country. He could have stayed. “I’ve done the arithmetic, and I could do great that way,” he said, “but I wouldn’t accomplish what I want to do to change the profession.” The firm he built still describes its fees as arrangements “that align our clients’ interests with our own.” A lawyer who takes injury cases on a contingent fee has always lived that way; the client pays for the result or does not pay. Bartlit’s contribution was to prove, from the defense side, where the hour had been sacred, that the same bargain makes a better lawyer, because a lawyer paid for the result has to want the courtroom.
Wanting the courtroom was his whole theory of the profession. “It is amazing how many lawyers have never tried a case,” he said, and “Very few cases actually go to trial today. It is a disturbing and unhealthy trend.” Of one of his own cases he gave the simplest reason for taking it: “Besides, no one else wanted to try it.” And he kept himself in a condition to do it. “Most trials are not sprints, but are marathons,” he said; “I’ve tried several cases that lasted three or four months,” and “So you must remain fit and have the strength and energy to handle it.” At seventy-six he was up by four, exercised for two hours, and played basketball. Late in life he wrote a book about it. The lesson is not the basketball. It is that he treated his own body as part of the trial team, because the last week of a long trial is decided by who still has the energy to think.
What he knew about jurors is the reason the entries in this Docket are written the way they are. “Jurors are like us: They hate not understanding things,” he said, and they trust the lawyers and the witnesses who help them understand. His cross-examinations were built on that. In an antitrust case he got the other side’s expert to tell the jury what he was paid for a day of testimony, and let the number sit beside what a juror earned for the same day. In the General Motors trial he read every document for one thing: “I identified every time the GM board and its executives displayed uncertainty,” because “if there’s uncertainty, it shows there’s no conspiracy.” That is a theme, found in the record and simple enough to carry through four months. And he had a rule about the man at the lectern: “I tell our young lawyers the one thing we know jurors do is evaluate everyone in court, and they don’t trust phonies.” “So always be yourself.” “John Wayne wouldn’t whine to the judge with objections.”
Why he is here. Because the people on this page who tried cases for the injured, Joe Jamail, Gerry Spence, Moe Levine, knew the same things from the other table, and it is worth hearing them from a man who spent fifty years defending the companies they sued. The jury does not want to be impressed. It wants to understand. The lawyer who pretends is found out by the second day. The case is won by the one who wanted the courtroom and arrived in shape for it. And a lawyer paid for the result is a lawyer who cannot afford to be a litigator, which is the lawyer Irving Younger’s Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination assume will be in the room.
So think about the lawsuit less and the trial more. Find the one thing the documents say over and over and build the case on it. Tell the jury what the expert is paid. Be the person you are at the lectern, because the people in the box can tell. Get up early and stay in shape, because the verdict comes in the fourth month. And take the fee that pays you for the result, because the day you do, you stop being a litigator.
Fred H. Bartlit Jr. (August 1, 1932, Harvey, Illinois, to August 6, 2026); United States Military Academy, B.S. in engineering; eight years in the U.S. Army, including service with the Army Rangers; University of Illinois College of Law, J.D. 1960, first in his class and editor of the law review; Kirkland & Ellis, Chicago, from 1963; founding partner of Bartlit Beck, 1993, with Phil Beck, Skip Herman, Don Scott, Jim Palenchar and Mark Ferguson; trial counsel in United States v. General Motors (1974), the Piper Alpha litigation, and the 2000 Florida election contest; chief counsel to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2010 to 2011; named one of the ABA Journal’s Lions of the Trial Bar; author of Choosing the Strong Path: Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging. The quotations are from Mark Curriden’s ABA Journal profile, Lions of the Trial Bar (March 2, 2009) and from Randall Samborn, Vanguard of a Fee Revolt, The National Law Journal (April 4, 1994), as posted by the firm; the fee language is the firm’s own; biography from Bartlit Beck’s biography and notice of August 10, 2026 and from Illinois Law’s remembrance. General information, not legal advice.
