Lisa Blatt has stood at the lectern of the United States Supreme Court more times than any woman who ever lived, and she did it by refusing to sound like a Supreme Court lawyer.
She is from San Angelo. University of Texas, then UT Law, then a clerkship with a D.C. Circuit judge named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Thirteen years in the Solicitor General’s office, where the government’s lawyers learn to argue in front of nine people who have read everything. Then Williams & Connolly, where she runs the Supreme Court practice. As of this spring she has argued fifty-seven cases at the Court and won nearly nine out of ten, the best record of any repeat advocate there.
What separates her is the voice. Supreme Court argument has a house style: careful, hedged, allergic to a plain sentence. Blatt talks to the Justices the way you would talk to a smart friend across a table. Short answers. Direct concessions. A willingness to say this is the weak part of my case and here is why it does not matter. The Justices interrupt everyone. She answers the question that was asked, not the one she prepared for, and then she gets back to her point.
The trick is not the voice. The voice is what preparation sounds like from the outside. She knows the record so completely that she can afford to be plain, because nothing a Justice throws at her is going to be new. Plain speech is a luxury you earn by outworking the room.
That is the lesson for a trial lawyer. The jury does not want to hear a lawyer. It wants to hear a person who knows the case cold and respects them enough to say it straight.
Lisa S. Blatt (born in San Angelo, Texas), B.A. and J.D., University of Texas; law clerk to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, D.C. Circuit (1989 to 1990); Assistant to the Solicitor General (1996 to 2009); partner at Williams & Connolly and chair of its Supreme Court and appellate practice. Argument count and record as reported in April 2026.
