Daniel Rakes

Daniel Rakes is an attorney in Baron & Budd’s Opioid Litigation Group. He joined the firm in 2019.

After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, cum laude, from Texas Tech University in 2012, Mr. Rakes attended the University of Houston Law Center. During law school, Mr. Rakes was a Dean’s Scholarship recipient who received the Lex Award for the highest grade of his class in Torts. He spent time interning at a firm specializing in family law, where he propounded and responded to discovery requests, researched issues pertaining to parental and third-party rights, conducted client interviews, and attended hearings and trials in juvenile and family court. He found the work fulfilling, but it was during his internship at a plaintiffs’ firm representing clients who had been harmed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that Mr. Rakes developed an abiding concern for the plights of people and communities egregiously harmed by the negligence of major corporations through no fault of their own.

Following receipt of his Juris Doctor in 2015, Mr. Rakes worked as a solo practitioner in wills and estate planning, yet the desire to make a tangible difference in the lives of individuals facing life-altering challenges continued to beckon. He went to work as a case manager at the Texas Civil Commitment office in Littlefield, providing supervision and case management to individuals released from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Following his promotion to Unit Supervisor, Mr. Rakes’ responsibilities included supervising the administrative staff, providing guidance on agency policy, and conducting internal investigations, all while maintaining a caseload of clients remanded to the criminal justice system.

The desire to affect good for more than one individual at a time continued to nag at Daniel Rakes, eventually leading him to seek employment in the private sector, where he found his legal skills could be better utilized as a contract attorney working in pharmaceutical litigation. Here, Mr. Rakes saw clearly how bringing justice to bear against negligent manufacturers, for causing significant and sometimes irreparable harm to patients who had innocently trusted their products, would benefit both individuals and society at large by reining in the ability of unscrupulous corporations to continue to cause injury. His subsequent move to Baron & Budd’s Opioid Litigation Group in 2019 was an easy and enthusiastic one, a move he has not regretted.