From the boardroom
to the courtroom.

Strategic, aggressive, and built for trial.

Albrecht Ritter, PLLC is a boutique litigation firm built for high-stakes business disputes. We do not use open-ended hourly billing. Engagements are structured as flat fees, contingency, or hybrid arrangements – so clients know what each stage of a matter costs before it starts.

We advise companies, boards, executives, and individuals on pre-litigation strategy and risk. We litigate post-M&A disputes, business partnership conflicts, and employment matters on either side of the "v." And we invest our own time and capital alongside plaintiffs in business contingency and hybrid-fee cases, including class actions.

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Who we
litigate against.

We have tried and settled cases against billion-dollar private equity firms and the BigLaw teams that represent them. We also defend against those cases. We are actively litigating hundreds of millions of dollars in business disputes nationwide, with significant work in Delaware.

Our advantage is the mix: a trial lawyer who ran a private equity firm, a Yale-trained litigator who clerked on the Seventh Circuit and in the federal district court for D.C. before practicing at Gibson Dunn, and an M&A partner who has closed hundreds of transactions (billions of transaction value) – working the same disputes from the same table.

We read deal documents, and the lawyers across the table, with fluency from both deep legal and business domains. Reps and warranties, indemnification baskets, earnouts, working-capital adjustments, management rollover, control provisions – these are not abstractions for us. We have negotiated them, papered them, and operated under them.

What we do.

i.

Pre-Litigation Strategy & Risk

The best result is often the case that never gets filed. We counsel companies, boards, and executives on emerging disputes – evaluating exposure, leverage, and the moves that matter before anyone files.

ii.

Post-M&A Litigation

Earnouts, indemnification, working-capital and purchase-price disputes, reps-and-warranties claims, fraud in the inducement, and Delaware fiduciary-duty fights. We litigate the disputes that follow the deal on both the buy and sell side.

iii.

Business Partnership Disputes

Partnerships fail the way marriages fail – slowly, then all at once. We represent partners, members, and shareholders in fiduciary-duty claims, freeze-outs, deadlock, books-and-records actions, and dissolutions. We also represent companies when partner disputes threaten the enterprise itself.

iv.

Employment Litigation

We defend companies and prosecute on behalf of executives and individuals in non-compete, trade-secret, discrimination, retaliation, wage-and-hour, and separation disputes. Same firm, different sides of the page.

A meaningful part
of our practice.

We invest our own time and capital alongside plaintiffs in cases where the merits, damages, and defendant warrant it – including class actions. We are good at it for reasons other firms cannot replicate.

i.

We underwrite cases the way investors underwrite deals.

Every contingency matter gets the same diligence: liability theory pressure-tested against the documents, damages modeled with real economic rigor, defendant's ability to pay confirmed, and the litigation budget mapped against realistic recovery. Our litigation chair ran a private equity firm before returning to law; underwriting cases is a core part of our business. We turn down more contingency cases than we take. That is the discipline that makes the model work.

ii.

Senior lawyers carry the cases.

Contingency work punishes leverage. Junior associates billing into a case the firm does not get paid on, hour by hour, is how plaintiffs' firms quietly go broke and how clients quietly lose. Our partners do the work. That is not a marketing posture – it is the economic structure of the firm.

iii.

We build hybrid structures most firms cannot offer.

Pure contingency is right for some matters, and other cases require a blended structure. Flat fee plus a success kicker. Capped engagements with a contingency tail. Contingency with a defense-cost cushion if the defendant counterclaims. We design the structure to fit the case and the client's balance sheet – and because our cost base is a fraction of a BigLaw firm's, we can offer terms larger firms cannot.

iv.

Plaintiff posture sharpens defense work, and vice versa.

Because we prosecute on contingency, we know exactly how plaintiffs' firms value cases, build damages, and decide what to settle. Our defense clients benefit from that. And because we defend the same claims for flat-fee clients, our contingency cases are built from day one to survive the motions defense lawyers will actually file. Few firms sit comfortably on both sides. We do.

Why
Albrecht Ritter.

01

Senior lawyers do the work.

No leverage tower of associates billing into the matter. The lawyer you hire is the lawyer drafting your brief and trying your case.

02

Aligned fee structures.

We do not use open-ended hourly billing. Engagements are structured as flat fees by phase, contingency, or hybrid arrangements, with scope and assumptions defined before each stage begins.

03

We understand the deal the way the deal team understood it.

M&A fluency and private equity operator experience are hard-wired into the firm. That changes the cases we win.

04

AI-augmented from intake to appeal.

We use secure AI workflows for case assessment, document review, deposition preparation, briefing, and citation verification. Our litigation partners are former federal clerks; research and creative argument are pillars of how we win. The point is not automation for its own sake – it is senior-lawyer judgment delivered with greater speed, discipline, and cost control.

Diverse Backgrounds.
Unique Strategy.

A trial lawyer who founded and ran a private equity firm. A Yale Law graduate and former Gibson Dunn appellate lawyer described as "among the best legal writers" his colleagues had worked with. An M&A partner who has closed hundreds of transactions and billions in deal volume.

Travis Robert-Ritter

Travis Robert-Ritter

Partner · Litigation Chair
Florida Office

Travis is the firm's litigation chair and heads the Florida office. His practice focuses on high-stakes business litigation nationwide, with an emphasis on aggressive plaintiff-side representation. He honed his skills as a hired gun, litigating high-stakes matters for a diverse range of clients. He now focuses on representing corporate clients and individuals who need zealous prosecution or defense, and whom he believes have been wronged.

Travis served as a federal appellate and trial-court law clerk, where he worked on a wide range of criminal and civil matters, including death-penalty cases. He practiced at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, where he defended and prosecuted a broad spectrum of disputes, including high-stakes legal-malpractice matters. He has represented America's largest companies in business disputes, defended a major cigarette manufacturer at trial, defended a gun manufacturer in product-defect cases, and represented individuals in complex partnership disputes and employment matters. Between his time at Boies and his return to litigation full-time, Travis founded and ran a private equity firm – experience that informs how he reads the deal documents at the center of the firm's post-M&A and partnership work.

"Travis is a rare deep genius, and one of the hardest workers and most versatile people I know. I have experienced his transformative work first hand." Lui Suarez · Founding Shareholder, Heise Suarez Melville PA
Florida Bar More about Travis →
Michael Showalter

Michael Showalter

Of Counsel · Complex Litigation
& Appellate

Michael is the firm's appellate and dispositive-motion lawyer – the one clients want when a case will be decided on a brief, on a motion, or on the strength of an argument no one else has thought to make.

"Among the best legal writers I've worked with at Gibson Dunn." A leading appellate partner

Michael graduated from Yale Law School in 2016 and clerked for Judge Diane Sykes on the Seventh Circuit and Judge Dabney Friedrich on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He has served as lead drafter in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the D.C., Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits, and the Delaware Court of Chancery, and has presented oral argument in the D.C. Circuit. His subject-matter focus spans constitutional law, administrative law, statutory and contract interpretation, and class certification, and his scholarship has appeared in the Notre Dame Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and other leading journals.

Michael leads the firm's AI-augmented practice, designing the workflows that allow Albrecht Ritter to deliver senior-level appellate and motion work on a flat-fee basis without sacrificing quality.

Michael is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia. He is not admitted to practice in Florida. Michael serves as Of Counsel to Albrecht Ritter through Showalter, PLLC.

Washington, D.C. Connect with Michael →
Eli Albrecht

Eli Albrecht

Partner · Corporate &
Delaware Advisory

Eli advises boards, buyers, sellers, and sponsors on the M&A and corporate dimensions of the firm's litigation work – including Delaware fiduciary-duty issues, deal-structure questions that affect post-close litigation exposure, and the corporate record that becomes the trial record when a deal goes sideways.

Before founding Albrecht Law, Eli was an M&A lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and DLA Piper. He has closed hundreds of transactions and billions in aggregate deal value, representing private equity, independent sponsors, family offices, searchers, and buyers and sellers of businesses. That depth is the reason the firm can litigate against the largest PE sponsors and their counsel without learning the deal mechanics on the client's dime – Eli has already negotiated the same provisions, on the same kinds of deals, against many of the same firms.

Eli also leads the M&A Department at Albrecht Law, a separate firm dedicated to providing sophisticated, client-focused advice on complex transactions, on a fixed-fee model with broken-deal forgiveness.

Earlier in his career, Eli served in the IDF special forces. He earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and his B.S. in business, with high honors, from Johns Hopkins.

Eli is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Maryland. He is not admitted to practice in Florida.

More about Eli →

Discuss
your matter.

We respond to inquiries quickly. If your situation is time-sensitive – a TRO, an injunction, an earnout payment date, a board meeting – say so in the first sentence and we will treat it accordingly.

Inquiry

Brief intake. We follow up within one business day.