Board certification in criminal law is not a marketing designation. In Texas it requires substantial trial experience, peer review, and a written examination, and a small fraction of the state's licensed attorneys hold it in any specialty. Brent Mayr, of Mayr Law, P.C. in Houston, is a board-certified criminal defense specialist — a credential that describes verified, tested experience rather than a claim about it.
The prosecutor's vantage point
Mayr is a former prosecutor. That background is common enough among criminal defense lawyers to be unremarkable as a biographical fact and consequential as a professional one. Prosecutorial experience is, in practical terms, training in how charging decisions get made: which cases an office believes it can prove, how a file looks when it is thin, which internal approvals a theory requires, and how the discretion that precedes an indictment actually operates.
In federal practice that vantage point matters most in the pre-indictment window. The period between an investigation becoming known — through a target letter, a subpoena, or an agent's approach — and a grand jury returning a true bill is the one phase in which the question is still whether there will be a case, not only how it ends. Lawyers who have sat on the other side of that decision approach it differently from lawyers who have not.
Leadership in the defense bar
Mayr is a past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. Harris County is the most populous county in Texas and one of the highest-volume criminal jurisdictions in the United States; its defense bar is correspondingly large and its association is one of the more substantial local criminal defense organizations in the country. Election to lead it is a judgment rendered by peers who try cases against and alongside the person they are electing.
Teaching trial advocacy
He serves on the Trial Advocacy faculty at Harvard Law School. Trial advocacy instruction is not lecture work. It is the supervision of students conducting direct and cross-examination, making objections, and delivering openings and closings, with feedback delivered in real time. Faculty positions of that kind are staffed by practitioners who try cases, because the instruction is a transfer of craft rather than doctrine.
Teaching cross-examination requires being able to do it. The two are the same skill observed from different chairs.
Recognition and public profile
Mayr has been named to Texas Super Lawyers for fourteen consecutive years. Peer-selection lists are an imperfect instrument, and this publication does not treat them as rankings or as endorsements. What sustained inclusion over fourteen years does indicate is durable professional standing among lawyers who practice in the same courts over a long period, which is a different and more informative signal than a single year's listing.
He served as counsel in the Cowboy Cartel case, which was featured on Apple TV+. Cases that attract documentary treatment carry a particular set of pressures — a public record that forms in parallel with the litigation, media attention that outlasts the docket, and the necessity of representing a client whose matter is being narrated by people with no obligation to the client's interests.
The federal case reports
Federal Defense Stories has published four case reports drawn from federal outcomes Mayr obtained: a capitol-entry charge dismissed in the District of Columbia in 2021; securities fraud and aiding-and-abetting charges dismissed in the Southern District of Texas in 2018; a Medicare fraud charge dismissed in the Southern District of Texas in 2017; and conspiracy and money laundering counts that ended in acquittal at trial in the Western District of Texas in 2012.
Each report is published under this publication's editorial standards for results reporting: client names removed, no case numbers published, courts identified by jurisdiction only, and every outcome attributed to the firm that obtained it. The reports are not offered as predictive of anything. They are offered as documented dispositions accompanied by explanatory reporting on how each category of federal charge actually works.
Practice areas represented in this publication
- Federal fraud, including securities fraud and aiding-and-abetting theories
- Federal health care fraud, including Medicare billing prosecutions
- Money laundering and conspiracy charges
- Federal misdemeanor and petty-offense prosecutions in the District of Columbia