Brooks Law Firm
In memoriam. Robert Brooks, who founded Brooks Law Firm together with his son Patrick, practiced criminal law in Memphis for nearly forty years. This page remains as a record of his career and of the firm they built together.
A Practice Built on Four Decades of Criminal Work
Robert Brooks began practicing criminal defense law nearly forty years ago. Over the decades that followed, his work spanned the full arc of a criminal case: investigation, motion practice, jury trial, sentencing, and every layer of appellate and collateral review. He tried criminal cases and handled appeals, post-conviction petitions, and habeas corpus matters in Tennessee state and federal courts. He practiced privately and, for a period of his career, served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender, representing people accused of federal crimes in the Western District of Tennessee and on appeal.
In the later part of his career he narrowed his practice to a single discipline — the appellate and post-conviction review of criminal cases — because it was the work he cared most about and the work he believed most often went undone. He held the view that appellate advocacy rewards lawyers who understand not only how a case is argued on paper but how it was actually tried: what a prosecutor was thinking, what the jury saw, where the record is strong and where it is silent.
The Appellate Practice He Built
His appellate and post-conviction work included:
- Direct appeals from convictions in Tennessee Criminal Courts to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals and, where applicable, the Tennessee Supreme Court
- Federal criminal appeals from the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
- Post-conviction relief petitions under Tennessee’s Post-Conviction Procedure Act, including claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and newly discovered evidence
- State and federal habeas corpus petitions challenging convictions and sentences on constitutional grounds
- Petitions for writ of certiorari to the Tennessee Supreme Court and to the Supreme Court of the United States
- Post-sentencing motions and compassionate release in federal cases
Courts of Practice
- Criminal Court of Shelby County, Tennessee
- Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals
- Tennessee Supreme Court
- United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee
- United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
- Supreme Court of the United States
The Firm He Helped Build
Brooks Law Firm, which Robert and Patrick Brooks founded together, continues at 2299 Union Avenue in Midtown Memphis. Patrick Brooks handles the firm’s criminal defense practice, including the criminal appeals and post-conviction work his father spent much of his career on, and Beth Brooks handles family, juvenile, estate, disability, and civil matters. The commitment that shaped the firm from the beginning — that a client should know the lawyer handling the case and receive candid counsel about what the law can and cannot do — has not changed.
For criminal defense, appellate, or other legal matters, contact Brooks Law Firm at (901) 324-5000 or see the firm profile.