Attorney Spotlight: Brett Hill, Houston Injury Lawyer
Brett M. Hill grew up in the Sam Houston National Forest, which is less an address than a stretch of pine country north of the city he now practices in. He is a sixth-generation Texan, which in Texas is a fact people keep track of. Before law school he spent four years in the United States Marine Corps and came out of it with two meritorious promotions, the ones handed out ahead of schedule for performance rather than earned by waiting for a date to come around.
He took his law degree at South Texas College of Law in Houston in 2011 and was licensed the following April. Nine months after that, at a point when most lawyers his age were still learning which courtroom was which, he and Ty Gibson registered a firm of their own. Gibson Hill P.C. has been running since January 2013 and is still two lawyers and a handful of staff, working out of Hawthorne Street near Montrose, with a second Houston office on the West Sam Houston Parkway and a third in Austin.
Brett has further honed his advocacy skills representing hundreds of clients through often highly contentious litigation.
— Gibson Hill Personal Injury, firm bio
Almost all of it is injury work, and almost all of it is Houston. He is licensed in Colorado as well, since May 2024, but the practice lives in Harris County and the counties around it.
The Winningest Advocacy Program in the Country
South Texas College of Law is not a school that trades on its overall national ranking, and it does not have to, because its advocacy program has won more national championships than any law school in the United States. It was the first to reach a hundred titles and is now past a hundred and forty, and U.S. News currently places it sixth in the country for trial advocacy. Hill spent a great deal of law school inside that program, traveling to competitions around the country as one of its top advocates and collecting a run of advocacy awards on the way.
That is an unusual apprenticeship, because competitive advocacy is the closest thing law school offers to the actual job, and a great many graduates arrive at their first firm having never stood up in front of anyone. The peer recognition has come more recently, and mostly at once. Super Lawyers selected him for the first time in 2026, from a pool built by peer nomination and its own research that takes five percent of the lawyers in a state. Best Lawyers has carried him in its Ones to Watch listing since 2025 and named him again in the 2026 edition, for plaintiffs’ personal injury litigation.
The most telling assessment of the trial ability came from someone equipped to judge it. A Houston attorney who had been hurt in a collision with an eighteen-wheeler, and who had already signed with what he calls another top rated law firm, happened to watch Hill work one day and changed counsel.
I am an attorney and wanted the best. I thought I was getting the best with this other firm, but was sadly mistaken. I saw Brett in court one day and was impressed with his trial abilities and consulted with him.
— a client, on the firm’s testimonials page
The Injuries a City Like Houston Produces
The bread and butter is what it is anywhere: cars, trucks, motorcycles, people knocked down in parking lots. What makes the rest of the list distinctly Houston is the industry around it. Offshore injuries come out of the Gulf and oil field injuries out of the patch, both of them lines of work that pay well and maim people at industrial rates. Railroad workers arrive with claims that run on their own federal statute. Then there are the eighteen-wheeler, underride and rollover cases off the freight corridors feeding the port, garbage truck collisions on residential streets, and negligent security claims against apartment complexes where somebody was hurt because nobody was watching the gate.
Out in Longview, a three-step steel stool gave way at a rivet six days after a woman bought it at a Home Depot, and she needed surgery on her arm; Hill sued the ladder’s national manufacturer for a manufacturing defect, a design defect and ordinary negligence, then spent 2023 building it out, serving written discovery and initial disclosures on the same June day and designating his experts in August. The other is a highway case. Dennis and Tina Beighle were driving north on Interstate 35 through Bell County in March 2020 when a driver working for a California company crossed into their lane and struck them on the driver’s side, and Hill and Gibson signed the petition together.
He has ranged well outside injury work when something else came through the door: a welder’s unpaid-wages claim under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a civil rights suit against a Houston police officer and the City, and at least one turn at the defense table, answering for a logistics company sued by a freight carrier. Most of the practice, though, never surfaces in a federal record at all, because it is tried or settled a few blocks from his office in the Harris County courthouse, where the results do not come with published opinions attached to them.
What that work looks like from the client’s chair turns up in the reviews, and the shape is consistent. Treatment gets arranged early, before anybody knows what the case is worth, which for people who are hurt and not working is the part that matters first. One client describes a two-year run of four spinal injections and two surgeries, with Hill standing next to her at the mediation explaining what was about to happen. Another, rear-ended, reports every medical expense covered including the surgery. At the far end sits the unglamorous arithmetic of a personal injury recovery, the negotiating down of hospital and insurer claims against the settlement so that something is actually left over, which is the job of the fourth person on the firm’s four-person staff list, whose title is reductions administrator.
The Jury Came Back in June
On the fourth of June this year Hill posted a short video thanking Harris County jurors, with a line underneath for anyone who had missed it: they had won the trial. It is a modest way to mark the thing a trial lawyer spends a career trying to do, and it is entirely in keeping with the rest of what he puts out, because Brett Hill has turned out to be very good at short comedy about the practice of law.
The videos run fifteen or twenty seconds and are shot in the office with his own staff, who play along with visible enthusiasm. Every litigator would recognize the recurring cast: the pile of filings that always has one more thing in it, the paralegal the whole place would collapse without, the client who has arrived convinced the case is worth a million dollars, and the special misery of Houston drivers in the rain. Several have been played more than a hundred thousand times, which is a wider audience than most Texas lawyers will address in a lifetime of closing arguments.
In between the jokes he runs a recurring question of the day, inviting people to ask him whatever they want about the law and answering on camera. He and Gibson also co-sign the firm’s blog, which is less marketing than instruction manual, working through the things a person actually needs after a wreck: how to read an accident report, how to request the surveillance footage before it is taped over, what happens at a deposition, how a settlement is paid out and why the check is smaller than the number.
Bowhunting Season
When he is not working he goes back to the country he came from. Hill bowhunts, which is the patient end of the sport, the version that puts a person close enough to an animal to hear it move and then asks him to stay completely still. For a man who spends his working life talking, it is a conspicuously quiet way to spend a Saturday.
There are two sons and two daughters and a wife at home, and the firm on Hawthorne Street has carried the same two names since 2013. Fourteen years after Texas handed him a license, the kid out of the pine country north of the city has four children of his own, which makes them the seventh generation.
