Benjamin R Barnett

Practice Areas

Ben Barnett is a leading eDiscovery attorney who has played a key strategic role in significant civil and criminal matters for more than 17 years. Many of the eDiscovery strategies that Mr. Barnett developed in the crucible of national multi-district litigations in the U.S. now serve as “best practices” for companies facing serial litigation and investigations. Mr. Barnett helped engineer and implement Dechert’s client-focused eDiscovery Advisory Team (eDAT) and Preferred Vendor Program (PVP) which aim to transform eDiscovery from an area of legal and financial risks to a source of strategic strength supporting clients’ litigation and business objectives. In the past decade, Mr. Barnett’s work has increasingly been for clients facing simultaneous multi-jurisdictional criminal investigations and civil litigation such as the Takata Airbag litigation which arose from the largest automotive recall in U.S. history.

Recently, Mr. Barnett was the chief architect of the disclosure strategy for the global Airbus investigation which resulted in a same-day resolution with authorities in France, the UK, and the U.S. in 2020. Working within a client-created Virtual Law Firm, Mr. Barnett designed, implemented, and managed a strategy to accelerate the identification and production of key evidence to the authorities in three jurisdictions while navigating a maze of different data security laws, privacy restrictions, languages, and legal privilege regimes. This unified strategic approach significantly reduced the time and cost of disclosure and generated millions in cooperation credit for Airbus. Airbus , the VLF, and the Dechert team received multiple awards for their ground-breaking work in the investigation and in 2020 Mr. Barnett was the recipient of a North American Innovation Lawyer Award from the Financial Times for his work on the Airbus investigation.