AZA once again was included on a national list of “Most Feared” law firms. The list features firms that legal decision-makers say are the top firms they do not want to see on the other side of a lawsuit. The trial boutique AZA is listed among a sea of mostly national and international law firms.  

The 2025 list was compiled by BTI Consulting, a group that annually interviews top legal clients about the most important law firms in the nation. AZA has made BTI lists in the past dozen years being the most fearsome or as “Awesome Opponents” or as “Client Service A Team” achievers.   

No wonder. AZA also made the lists released this year of The National Law Journal’s Top 100 Verdicts of 2023 and the Top 100 Verdicts in the United States complied by TopVerdict.com. This was for a $41.8 million win from a South Texas jury in an oil and gas trespass case against Energy Transfer.  

That verdict was one of two Top 50 Texas Verdicts for AZA. The other was a Fort Bend County unanimous jury verdict of $9 million against a prominent Odessa businessman and others involved in a conspiracy against DistributionNOW (DNOW), a leading global supplier of energy and industrial products and services.  

AZA, which has already been to trial 16 times this year with a few more trials to come, frequently makes top-verdict lists and may do so again before the end of the year. A sample of wins that are public from this year includes:  

• In a business divorce trial where the plaintiff presented damages of up to $82 million, a Harris County jury unanimously found that the plaintiff should take nothing and returned a verdict in favor of AZA’s clients. In the two-week trial concerning a diabetes treatment consultancy, the complex jury charge was 34 pages long.  

• In a case where the other side sought $30 million but took nothing, this year, a judge certified a $2.4 million jury award to AZA client Odessa Pumps in attorneys’ fees. It was a breach-of-contract case against GR Energy and its affiliates over a 2021 asset purchase. Odessa Pumps, a DistributionNOW company, is a provider of pump products in the energy industry. Odessa Pumps bought Flex Flow, a horizontal pumping system business, from GR Energy. Later, both sides sued each other over issues including breach of contract, a noncompete promise and unpaid fees. 

• Working in concert with the federal government for five years, lawyers at AZA saw their whistleblower client receive $3 million of the $15 million settlement of a lawsuit alleging that Houston surgeons were letting unqualified trainees perform parts of heart surgeries while the surgeons billed for two or three concurrent surgeries. The settlement is with Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine and Surgical Associates of Texas P.A. The government said it’s the largest settlement on record for Medicare fraud over concurrent surgery claims.  

• AZA won a $25.6 million breach-of-contract jury verdict in a Harris County court case pitting AZA client doctors’ group Fondren Orthopedic Ltd. against healthcare giant HCA Healthcare. Fondren and HCA were in a limited partnership that owns and operates Texas Orthopedic Hospital. The jury found that HCA had broken the non-compete provisions of the contract by opening competing hospitals and preventing the Fondren group doctors from doing the same. 

• In another win for an energy giant, the Supreme Court of Texas agreed with AZA’s appellate team when it found that a trial court abused its discretion when it failed to dismiss a case against energy giant Weatherford International. The justices found that Weatherford could not be sued in a Texas court. The case was filed by the family of a worker who lived in South Africa and centered on questions about a medical test conducted in Egypt. 

• AZA won a major victory for Meta employees when a California state judge ruled in a wrongful termination lawsuit that Meta’s secretive arbitrations of employee lawsuits are substantively unconscionable and that the arbitration results can be made public.