Mr Robert Ebert Byrnes | Attorney

Robert E. Byrnes is a founding member, with Andrea Moss, of Moss & Byrnes PLLC, a New York-based boutique trial firm that represents employees and executives in high-stakes employment litigation, wage-and-hour disputes, and complex separations.

Modeled on a trial-ready philosophy, Moss & Byrnes refuses to operate as a settlement mill. While many plaintiff-side firms drag cases for years only to fold on the courthouse steps, Moss & Byrnes prepares every case for trial from day one—deploying aggressive discovery, advanced data analytics, and game-theory modeling to calculate expected value with actuarial precision. This data-driven approach, which forecasts jury verdicts, mediation outcomes, and judicial behavior, allows the firm to anticipate opposing analyses and extract maximum leverage for clients. Andrea Moss, the firm’s lead trial lawyer, has tried more than 50 employment cases to verdict in New York state and federal courts. The firm’s credibility in the courtroom is what drives superior results everywhere else.

Robert’s quantitative bent was forged early. A 1988 graduate of Brown University, where he earned the Susan Colver Rosenberger Prize as the top student in his major, he also received a master’s degree at Harvard specializing in statistics and multiple-regression analysis. In the early 1990s he applied those skills performing valuation and market studies for the owner of a AAA baseball franchise pursuing either an expansion MLB team or the purchase of an existing club. He then moved to Beacon Hill as chief speechwriter for Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld. Byrnes’s flair for the memorable phrase was noted in a 1995 Boston Globe article, and his bravura 1995 inaugural address for Cellucci reportedly overshadowed the governor’s own and, in the view of some Boston political observers, helped lay the groundwork for Cellucci’s eventual succession to and election as governor. During the 1994 campaign Byrnes was enlisted by Weld to play Weld’s opponent in debate prep after Weld’s surprisingly shaky performance in the first debate, which led some to partly credit Byrnes’s debate prep role for Weld’s re-election with a still-record 71%.

Robert earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1998. On his first day at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP he was put on a sexual-harassment trial then underway in Los Angeles Superior Court. At Quinn he defended IBM, Raytheon, Wells Fargo, and others in employment class actions and worked on the firm’s representation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Welles v. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, No. CV 03-05143 (C.D. Cal. 2003), the Citizen Kane copyright dispute. While in Los Angeles he co-founded the Los Angeles Bike Messenger Co-op, serving simultaneously as a bike messenger and general counsel—captured in a 2002 Los Angeles Daily Journal story of Robert and firm founder John Quinn biking a delivery to the federal courthouse.

After Quinn Emanuel, Robert moved over to representing plaintiffs, and founded Lawyers for Employee and Consumer Rights APC in Los Angeles before returning east to co-found Moss & Byrnes PLLC. His representative results include:

· $2.1 million class settlement for children’s-clothing retail employees denied overtime

· $2 million class settlement for department-store sales associates denied meal and rest breaks

· $1.65 million class settlement for nurses and healthcare workers

· Landmark fast-food chain settlement installing an industry-leading compliance monitoring program

· High five-figure individual recovery for a Long Island restaurant worker denied overtime

· Barkley v. Audient Capital GP Ltd. et al., No. 1:25-cv-00205 (S.D.N.Y.) – pending action seeking in excess of $4.2 million in unpaid compensation, bonuses, and equity for the former head of investor relations at a Cayman Islands hedge fund.

Robert also routinely negotiates complex separation agreements for C-suite executives and heads of major non-profits.

In 2002 he co-authored (with Jaime Marquart) the cult-classic Brush with the Law, a gonzo memoir of Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School that earned kudos from Hunter S. Thompson: “This is a wonderfully depraved book… a classic of degenerate humor, and the pathological greed that rules the black heart of the legal profession. I recommend it highly.”

Robert is admitted to the state bars of New York, California, and Texas.