- Trusted by Clients and Referring Attorneys
- Focused on Serious and Complex Matters
- High-Impact Case Focus
- 20+ Years Experience
Corpus Christi, and a Front Row Seat to What the Law Actually Does
Jennifer O’Brien Stogner grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, the daughter of a lawyer. That fact sounds simple enough until you understand what it actually meant for the way she came to see the world.
Her father, Michael O’Brien, practiced law in Corpus Christi. While other kids her age were working retail jobs and summer internships with no particular direction, Jennifer was working as a legal secretary at her father’s firm during college. She was not filing papers in the background. She was watching people walk through the door of a law office carrying the most frightening, most disorienting moments of their lives, and she was watching what a good attorney could do to help them find their way to the other side.
That experience did not inspire her to become a lawyer in the abstract, soft way people sometimes describe a calling. It showed her specifically what was at stake when the legal system worked the way it was supposed to, and what it cost real people when it did not. She graduated from Texas A&M Corpus Christi in 2002 with a double major in Finance and Accounting, built for the analytical precision that serious litigation demands, and enrolled at South Texas College of Law Houston in 2003.
Her father had gone to South Texas. She knew exactly what she was walking into. She also knew she intended to be the best advocate the program had ever seen.
Eleven Tournaments, One National Championship, and the Man Across the Table
South Texas College of Law Houston’s advocacy program is one of the most competitive in the country. It produces trial lawyers, not just law school graduates, because the program is built around the understanding that you learn to try cases by trying cases, over and over, against the best competition you can find, until the pressure of the courtroom feels like home.
Jennifer competed in eleven national moot court and mock trial tournaments during her time at South Texas. Eleven. That is not a student who showed up to compete. That is a student who was building something, one tournament at a time, with a deliberateness that most of her peers would not have had the stamina to match.
On the first day of law school, she met Brant Stogner. He was from El Campo, had played linebacker on a football scholarship until his knees gave out three times, and had the same unmistakable quality she recognized in herself: the kind of focus that does not require anyone else to tell you it is worth it.
They were competitors before they were partners. They pushed each other harder because of it. That dynamic never stopped.
In 2006, in their final semester of law school, Jennifer and Brant competed together in the ATLA Student Trial Advocacy Competition, the most prestigious trial advocacy championship in the country. They won the Regional Championship in Dallas. Then they went to Miami and won the National Championship. Jennifer received the Dean’s Outstanding Student Advocate Award and was nominated to the Order of Barristers. She graduated with her J.D. in 2006 and passed the Texas bar the same year.
She was ready for the courtroom. What she did next gave her something most trial lawyers never have: a complete picture of how both sides of a catastrophic case actually work.
Learning the Law from Both Sides of the Docket
Jennifer began her legal career at a plaintiff’s litigation firm, and her first major assignment placed her directly in the middle of the BP Texas City explosion litigation. If you are going to learn catastrophic injury law, there is almost no more demanding place to start. The Texas City disaster involved one of the largest industrial explosions in American history, fifteen deaths, hundreds of injuries, and litigation of extraordinary complexity against one of the largest corporations in the world. Jennifer was in it from the beginning of her career.
From there, her practice expanded in a direction that most plaintiff’s attorneys do not take. She crossed over to the defense side, representing individuals, small businesses, and large corporations in serious litigation. She handled cases from both directions with the full seriousness each required, building a portfolio of experience that ranged from claims worth less than a thousand dollars to cases worth more than eighty million.
What she was accumulating was not just experience. It was a complete map of how litigation works when the resources and the stakes are at their highest, from the moment of injury through discovery, expert battles, dispositive motions, trial preparation, and the final resolution. She understood what the defense was doing because she had done it herself. She understood what it cost to fight a well-resourced defendant to the finish line because she had sat in the rooms where those decisions were made.
There is no better preparation for fighting a corporation than understanding, from the inside, exactly how a corporation prepares to fight you.
She joined Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner as Of Counsel in 2018, bringing nearly twelve years of that accumulated experience to one of the oldest and most respected plaintiff’s firms in Texas. In February 2025, she was elevated to partner, one of the first two female partners in the firm’s more than 74-year history.
The recognition was real. But that was not the point. The point was the work.
What Nearly Two Decades of Catastrophic Cases Actually Looks Like
Jennifer’s practice covers the full range of what catastrophic personal injury litigation demands:
- Industrial and petrochemical explosions
- Commercial vehicle and 18-wheeler collisions
- Construction site falls
- Defective products, including automobile and tire defects
- Premises liability
- Drowning and aquatic injury deaths
- Traumatic brain injuries
- Jones Act and maritime claims
- Bad faith insurance claims
- Wrongful death across every case type
She has been recognized by national verdict and settlement tracking organizations for top-ranked results in premises liability, residential premises liability, drowning accidents, workplace accidents, burn injuries, motor vehicle collisions, and personal injury broadly. Those rankings exist because her results exist. They reflect real recoveries, in real cases, for real people who came to her when the worst thing that had ever happened to them had just happened.
She has also been named to the Texas Super Lawyers list from 2021 through 2025, appeared on the Texas Rising Stars list in 2018 and 2019, and since 2023 has been included on both the Up-and-Coming 50: Women Texas Rising Stars and the Up-and-Coming 100: Texas Rising Stars lists. Best Lawyers in America has recognized her for Personal Injury Litigation, Plaintiffs from 2024 through 2026, and for Litigation in Insurance from 2025 through 2026.
One hundred percent of her practice is devoted to litigation. She does not do anything else. When a case comes into Team Stogner, it gets an attorney whose entire professional life is built around fighting it.
The Partnership That Changes What Is Possible
People sometimes ask what it is like to practice law with your spouse. It is the wrong question, or at least it misses the point. The better question is what it means for the clients. Brant and Jennifer Stogner did not become a professional partnership because they got married. They became a professional partnership because of what they each bring to a case, and because those things fit together in a way that is genuinely rare. Brant’s background is in trial. His record includes twelve jury verdicts in his first three years, a $22 million workplace safety verdict recognized as the largest in Texas that year, and more than $230 million in gross recoveries, before deduction of attorney’s fees and litigation expenses, across nearly two decades of catastrophic injury litigation. Jennifer’s background is in the complete picture: plaintiff litigation from the beginning, defense work at the highest level, and a return to the plaintiff’s side with a depth of understanding about how corporate defendants prepare that most trial lawyers simply do not possess.
When they co-try a case, the preparation that surrounds that case is different from what a single attorney or a loosely connected team can build. They know each other’s instincts. They know where each of them is strongest and what each of them needs from the other. They have been competing and preparing together since the first day of law school, and that foundation does not have to be built from scratch every time a new case comes in.
Most legal partnerships are organizational. This one is foundational. There is a difference between two people who share a firm and two people who share a standard.
They have three children together, Ryker, Beckett, and Holland, and they coach youth sports, serve their community, and stay deeply connected to the school that launched both of their careers. Jennifer served as President of the South Texas College of Law Houston Alumni Association from 2022 through 2024 and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. She is a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She bakes. She reads. She is competitive in everything she does, and she does not separate that quality from the way she practices law.
Her motto for her kids and her cases is the same sentence: safety first, otherwise someone gets hurt. When a corporation or a property owner or an employer failed that standard and someone’s life was destroyed because of it, Jennifer Stogner takes that failure personally. And then she prepares.
What the Partnership Means for the People Who Hire Them
If you have been catastrophically injured, or if you have lost someone you love because a company decided that cutting costs or ignoring safety was acceptable, you are about to enter one of the most difficult experiences of your life. The legal process is not designed around your convenience or your grief. It is designed to be fought, by people who understand the system well enough to use it, against defendants who have been in this situation before and are prepared for it.
What Team Stogner offers is not just two attorneys with strong records. It is two attorneys who have spent their entire careers building toward exactly this kind of case, who understand from the inside how the opposition prepares, and who have already proven in the courtroom and at the settlement table that their preparation produces results.
That combination, Brant’s trial record and relentless preparation, Jennifer’s dual-sided experience and complete command of how serious litigation works, is not something most firms can offer. It is not something most attorneys can offer individually. Together, it is what makes Team Stogner different from every other option available to you.
They have been building toward this since Corpus Christi, since El Campo, since the first day of law school, since Miami.
If you or your family needs a team that is truly prepared to fight for the outcome you deserve, contact Team Stogner today. The consultation is free. The commitment is everything.
Results Disclosure: All case results referenced on this page reflect gross verdicts or settlements before deduction of attorney’s fees and litigation expenses. Results are specific to the facts, injuries, and circumstances of each individual case. Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.
Fee Arrangement: Stogner Trial Law handles personal injury and wrongful death cases on a contingency fee basis. You pay no attorney’s fees unless we recover compensation for you. Litigation expenses, including filing fees, expert costs, and deposition costs, are advanced and are recovered from any settlement or verdict. If there is no recovery, you owe no attorney’s fees. Please discuss the specific terms of your representation with your attorney.
You don’t have to carry this burden alone. Reach out directly to our team. We will listen, we will evaluate, and if we take your case, we will not stop until justice is done.
Trusted partnerships built on results, integrity, and client care.