Michele Focht is a Partner in Freeman Mathis & Gary’s Dallas Office, Vice-Chair of the firm's Data & Privacy Compliance national practice team, and part of the Tech Errors and Omissions Practice Section and Compliance & Incident Response Team.

Ms. Focht’s commercial litigation practice focuses on litigation of intellectual property claims (trade secret, trademark, copyright). She also handles a variety of more traditional commercial litigation including commercial contract, unfair business practice, and trade libel and false advertising, as well as claims brought against individual owners, directors, and officers for alleged breach of fiduciary duty, and the alleged improper usurping of business opportunities.

Ms. Focht comes to Freeman Mathis & Gary from Baker McKenzie where she was part of the Commercial Litigation practice area and a member of the Discovery and Cyber team. There her practice included working with multinational clients on high profile corporate actions including complex litigation. Ms. Focht also has experience in working on cyber and privacy breach incidents as well as working with federal and state regulatory agencies and State Attorney Generals.

Beginning her legal career as an Assistant District Attorney, Ms. Focht spent 15 years in lobbying, legislative drafting and analysis and nonprofit executive leadership for two national non-profits and several local agencies before returning to legal practice in 2012.  

Texas

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas

• “Congress ready to implement new cyber incident and ransomware payment reporting legislation“, FMG BlogLine

National e-discovery counsel for large publicly traded telecommunications company for 12 years working on large complex data sets for 2^nd request, merger & acquisition, trade secret litigation, patent infringement litigation and federal investigations.

Represented multi-national company in “no poach” antitrust claim by the US Department of Justice and subsequent anti-trust multidistrict litigation.

Represented global company in “price-fixing” investigation by US Department of Justice.

Represented Fortune 500 company following cyber-attack and subsequent investigation.

Represented municipal government in cyber incident and subsequent investigation.

Represented multi-national companies in developing and strengthening privacy policies.

American Bar Association

Dallas Bar Association

State Bar of Texas

The Sedona Conference, Working Group 1, 6, & 11

Attorneys Serving the Community

Women in eDiscovery

Finalist Jessup Moot Court Competition, 1989

Developed CLE training:  Ethics in Information Governance (2022)

Developed CLE Training: Best Practices for Drafting and Responding to Discovery Requests (2023)

Developed Webinar Presentation on Hot Topics in Investigations: Ephemeral Messaging, Emojis and Sanctions (2023)