Harry L. Manion III

Over the course of the last 40 years, Harry has become one of the winningest trial lawyers in the country, having won his first jury trial in the second chair in 1979 while a junior associate at Hale and Dorr in Boston. Since joining Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP in April 2018, Harry has become the leader of a newly formed national trial team, parachuting into the firm’s most challenging trials including defending a high eight-figure breach of foreign distribution contract before a state court jury in Miami and obtaining defense verdicts on nine out of ten counts, with the plaintiff being awarded only transition costs; obtaining a favorable ruling on causation during phase one of a bifurcated trial in an admiralty case pending in SDNY involving the explosion of a container ship causing a casualty loss in excess of $300 million; and developing and orchestrating the successful defense in a high eight-figure jury trial in Oklahoma state court involving allegations of bad faith insurance coverage of an experimental cancer treatment. Harry has also served as co-lead for the trial team in a plaintiff patent infringement case pending against Adobe Software in the Eastern District of Virginia in which a jury returned verdicts on infringement and invalidity in favor of plaintiff; and, most recently, acting as co-lead trial counsel in a breach of construction contract jury trial in state court in Boston in which the jury awarded the plaintiff 100 percent of the approximate $22 million in damages sought and rejected defendant’s $12 million in counterclaims.

Parachuting into the most challenging trials in the country (and globally) is nothing new to Harry. He has been doing it since the late 1980s when he co-founded, along with legendary trial lawyer Earle Cooley, a successful litigation boutique in Boston, Cooley Manion Jones. It was with Mr. Cooley that Harry tried his first high-profile case in 1981 between the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Celtics over the rights to NBA star Danny Ainge, utilizing a trial methodology and approach he learned at the knee of Judge Herb Stern, based upon Judge Stern’s groundbreaking trial treatise “Trying Cases to Win.” Harry became an early Stern disciple, teaching with Judge Stern at his seminars as well as teaching his own trial advocacy class at Boston College Law School for over 10 years.

Harry has the ability to add immediate and dramatic value to any case headed to trial regardless of whether he has had prior involvement in the matter. This valuable skill and capability derives from his 40 years of trying cases, which span the spectrum of substantive law in federal and state courts throughout the US; his mastery of Stern’s principles, methods and trial techniques; and the sheer volume of diverse litigation for which he has been lead counsel for the likes of Koch Industries, Paychex, Lukoil, Nike, and Sodexo, to name a few. As national coordinating counsel for several large corporations, Harry has settled tens of thousands of cases and has taken only three adverse verdicts in the more than 30 years he has served these clients.

Harry is uniquely qualified to assess trial risk or opportunity on short notice without having had prior involvement in the case. This is precisely what occurred in his first five trials at Hunton Andrews Kurth. Harry was brought in on short notice, seamlessly became part of the trial team, assisted the teams in formulating the winning theory, mock tried the case if warranted, and then executed the winning theme at trial.

Harry led a successful trial in the Business Court of Amsterdam representing a large Dutch pension fund against State Street Global Advisors. Working with local Dutch trial counsel, Harry formulated and helped execute the winning theory at trial, obtaining a $68 million verdict, which was settled on appeal.

Hunton Andrews Kurth is proud to introduce Harry and his hand picked and personally trained national trial team and make them available on a non- hourly basis to assist existing as well as new clients in assessing trial risk/reward in any given case pending anywhere and to work seamlessly with inside and other outside counsel to win at trial.

Some of Harry’s most recent trial cases include:

• United Brands, S.A. v. Diageo Dominicana, S.R.L., 209 So. 3d 67 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2016) Google Scholar link
• In re M/V MSC FLAMINIA, 339 F. Supp. 3d 185 (S.D.N.Y. 2018) Google Scholar link
• Cunningham v. Aetna Life Ins. Co., CJ-2015-2826, (Okla. Dist. Ct. 2018)
• TecSec, Inc. v. Int'l Bus. Machines Corp., 763 F. Supp. 2d 800, 802 (E.D. Va. 2011), aff'd, 466 F. App'x 882 (Fed. Cir. 2012) Google Scholar link
• Cashman Dredging & Marine Contracting Co. v. Mass. Clean Energy Ctr., 1684CV02305 (Mass. Super. Ct. Suffolk Cnty. 2019)

Harry can be reached directly by email or by phone.

• Named a Litigation Star, Massachusetts, Benchmark Litigation, 2021-2025
• Named Best Lawyer in Commercial Litigation, The Best Lawyers in America, 2024
• Selected as a Super Lawyer for Business Litigation Law, Boston Super Lawyers magazine, 2004-2020

• Member, Massachusetts Bar Association
• Member, American Bar Association