Gabriel Assaad

Gabriel Assaad leads the complex litigation practice at McDonald Worley in Houston, Texas, where he handles mass tort, product liability, class action, consumer protection and wage-and-hour cases. He has held court-appointed leadership roles in multidistrict litigation, including the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committees in the Bair Hugger and Smith & Nephew Birmingham Hip Resurfacing MDLs and committee work in the 3M Combat Arms earplug MDL.

A Rochester, New York, native, Assaad earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Florida in 1996 and worked as a design engineer before attending Vanderbilt Law School, graduating in 2001. He began his legal career in patent litigation at Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, D.C., then moved to plaintiff work at Paulson & Nace, where he represented hundreds of injury victims and served as first or second chair in more than 15 jury trials. He later ran his own Washington firm, joined Kennedy Hodges in Houston in 2012 and built its mass torts practice before joining McDonald Worley in 2019.

Assaad was part of the appellate team that won reversal of the dismissal of the Bair Hugger MDL in the 8th Circuit, reinstating more than 5,000 cases, and he was named a 2022 Minnesota Trial Lawyer of the Year. He is admitted in Texas, the District of Columbia and Virginia.