People

William T. Reid, IV

William T. Reid, IV (“Bill”), the senior founding partner of Reid Collins & Tsai LLP, is widely recognized as one of the top business trial lawyers in the nation. His work has resulted in precedent-setting case law protecting investors and holding wrongdoers accountable while obtaining billions of dollars in recoveries for his clients.

A true trial lawyer, Bill developed his national reputation for successfully litigating complex commercial and financial cases in private practice after a remarkable run as a federal prosecutor. He has tried a wide range of civil and criminal matters to verdict before judges and juries in a career spanning three decades.

In leading Reid Collins to its position as one of the nation’s go-to plaintiff firms, Bill has prosecuted a broad array of international cases involving insolvency-related disputes, professional malpractice, business torts, fraud, and financial transactions. He has handled multiple high-stakes actions arising out of Ponzi schemes, illegal transactions, insider misconduct, and cross-border frauds, as well as fiduciary litigation and bad-faith insurance actions. Further, Bill has established the firm as an industry leader in professional malpractice claims, achieving numerous public (as well as confidential) multi-million-dollar settlements against law firms, accounting firms, and directors & officers.

He represents public companies, hedge funds, private equity funds, offshore liquidators, bankruptcy fiduciaries, SEC receivers, and individual clients, among others, and is currently managing a docket of plaintiff’s litigation seeking billions of dollars in damages.

Bill’s considerable trial experience is as varied as the clients he represents.

As an Assistant United States Attorney during the 1990′s, he focused on complex drug and corruption prosecutions, trying 25 cases to verdict (securing 24 convictions) and prosecuting hundreds of cases annually. Since returning to private practice in 2000, he has put his courtroom experience to good use, taking numerous commercial cases to trial. Notably, Bill has yet to lose a jury trial since returning to private practice and has obtained several top-100 trial judgments and verdicts for his plaintiff clients.

In December 2017, acting pro bono, Bill won an acquittal in a public corruption case on behalf of Olga Hernandez, a San Antonio School Board member wrongfully accused of bribery. In winning the Hernandez case, Bill achieved justice thwarting the misguided prosecution of an innocent citizen, in the process accomplishing what few trial lawyers achieve in their careers: jury trial wins on behalf of both civil plaintiffs and defendants and as a criminal prosecutor and a defense lawyer.

Additionally, Bill is now an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas Law School, teaching a course he created called Complex Financial Litigation, which takes a case study approach to teaching commercial litigation practice to law students.

Awards and Accolades

Bill’s reputation as one of the nation’s preeminent plaintiff’s trial lawyers is affirmed annually by all major industry publications. Among his higher-profile accolades, in both 2020 and 2023 Benchmark named Bill the “U.S. Plaintiff Attorney of the Year” and in 2021 Law360 honored him as a “Titan of the Plaintiffs Bar,” one of only a handful of litigators in the nation so recognized. In 2024, Lawdragon named Bill one of its national “Legends” of the bar after repeatedly recognizing him as one of the “500 Leading Lawyers in America.” He has been twice named a “Plaintiff’s Trailblazer” by the National Law Journal and a “Trailblazer” by Texas Lawyer. For six consecutive years, Bill has been selected as one of the “Top 100 Trial Lawyers in America” by Benchmark and he is regularly recognized as a one of the nation’s top practitioners by Chambers USA and Best Lawyers in America®. Further, many of his cases have been listed in the National Law Journal’s Top-100 verdicts in multiple years.

Bar Admissions and Organizations

Bill is admitted to practice in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second and Fifth Circuits, the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and all of the United States District Courts in Texas. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Fifth Circuit Bar Association, the New York State Bar, and the State Bar of Texas.

Education

After law school, Bill served as a law clerk to the Honorable Reynaldo G. Garza, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He received his J.D., cum laude, from St. John’s University School of Law, where he was an editor of the St. John’s Law Review. Bill achieved a dual undergraduate degree – a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Accounting – from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, cum laude.