Aaron Burdette Brings Rare Experience to U.S. LawShield Members

If you ever find yourself sitting at a defense table with your freedom, reputation and future hanging in the balance, there are plenty of qualities you want in the attorney sitting beside you. It’s a solid bet that experience will be at the top of that list. And when it comes to experience, former Harris County District Judge Aaron Burdette has seen the inside of a criminal courtroom from virtually every angle possible—a two-decade legal round robin from defense attorney to prosecutor to judge.

Now, Burdette has returned to the defense side, this time launching his own private practice, and perhaps most importantly, stepping into the critical role of serving as the new independent program attorney for U.S. LawShield members in the South Texas region.

For Texas members, that is a significant addition.

“I’ve been a licensed and practicing attorney for 20 years,” Burdette says. “I’ve been a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, a judge and now a defense lawyer again. So, I’ve been on all sides of the courtroom handling cases.”

And he isn’t talking about a career spent watching other attorneys try cases. Burdette has participated in more than 100 trials throughout his career.

Right out of law school, Burdette went to work as a criminal defense attorney with a small defense firm where he was thrown right into the legal fire of protecting clients. Then came 15 years with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, where he prosecuted cases ranging from misdemeanor assaults and drug offenses to intoxication manslaughter, white-collar crime and capital murder.

Taking that path gave him a view from one side of the courtroom. Fifteen years prosecuting cases gave him the view from the other. Then came the view from the middle.

A Judge’s Perspective

Burdette left the DA’s office and joined U.S. LawShield in 2021 as deputy general counsel before quickly being promoted to general counsel in 2022. He loved his time there. In explaining what motivated him to step away from prosecuting criminals, Burdette explains, “I very much believed in the mission of U.S. LawShield and its members and the product that they offered.”

But as typically happens with talented legal minds, opportunity again came calling. Burdette left U.S. LawShield and was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott  in November 2023 to serve as the first judge of the newly created 486th Judicial District Court in Harris County, a felony criminal court. Just a year later, voters elected him to a full term in November 2024.

Burdette had every intention to remain on the bench, but the opportunity to establish a private practice that would serve U.S. LawShield members was enough to change those plans.

“The opportunity to become the program attorney for U.S. LawShield’s members came along and it was apparent that this was to be the next step in my career,” he says. “I believe in the mission of the company, its members and my abilities to protect those members, provide them with sound legal advice, and if we end up in court, to fight vigorously for them.”

Burdette resigned from the bench and quickly went to work setting up his own practice, but not before dramatically reducing a criminal docket on his time on the 486th that had accumulated roughly 1,200 pending cases when he took over.

“My docket went from over twelve hundred cases down to less than five hundred while I was on the bench. That accomplishment is a direct reflection of my hard work and dedication to the practice of law. It is the same hard work and dedication that I now bring to my practice,” he says.

But beyond managing criminal cases, what Burdette learned from the bench may be even more valuable. He calls the perspective “significant.” As a judge, Burdette discovered things about presenting cases that he says he had never fully appreciated as either a prosecutor or defense attorney.

Attorneys on both sides of a case walk into trial knowing the evidence. They know the police reports, the photographs, the witnesses and everything else imaginable.

“You know who doesn’t know any of that?” Burdette rhetorically asks before answering. “The judge and the jury.”

Watching trials unfold from the bench taught him how easily lawyers who understand a case intimately can forget that the people deciding it are encountering virtually everything for the first time.

“There’s a number of things that I learned as a judge that I didn’t fully appreciate as a prosecutor or a defense lawyer when it comes to presenting cases to a jury,” he says.

That lesson matters enormously in a self-defense case. The person who fired the gun knows what he saw, what he feared and why he reacted. The attorney has spent months studying the evidence. But eventually, a group of strangers may have to understand those crucial seconds well enough to determine if his actions were reasonable and whether the defendant ultimately goes home or to prison.

Knowing how to make them understand the facts of the case and how the situation appeared through the eyes of the defendant is what trial lawyering is all about.

When Trial Experience Matters

Burdette believes firearms-law knowledge is essential for an attorney representing gun owners. But when asked what Texas members should most want from the lawyer who could someday represent them, he didn’t hesitate to put trial ability at the top.

“The most important trait of a good U.S. LawShield independent program attorney is being a strong trial lawyer, because that’s where your freedom is really at stake,” Burdette says.

Legal questions about where a firearm may be carried or what your state’s laws allow are important. But those questions take on a whole new level when standing beside a U.S. LawShield member who has been arrested following a self-defense incident.

“You want somebody that knows the law, that knows all the sides, knows how to evaluate a case and knows how to present a case to the court and to a jury,” Burdette said. “Trial experience is what matters.”

Few lawyers get to develop that trial-level experience as a defense attorney, prosecutor and felony court judge. Burdette is one of those few.

“I enjoy going to trial,” he says. And in the courtroom is exactly where you want your attorney to be most comfortable when your freedom is on the line.

Building a Team for Texas Members

As solid as Burdette is as a gun rights attorney with extensive trial experience and unsurpassed legal connections throughout Texas, he isn’t doing it alone.

Burdette recently brought two former Texas prosecutors into his new firm, attorneys Kyle Gonzalez and Renee Serrato.

Gonzalez, a Houston native, earned her undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University before graduating cum laude from South Texas College of Law Houston in 2021. She spent two years with the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office, including a year working in felony court.

Serrato brings an equally impressive background. A Pasadena native and South Texas College of Law graduate, he served in the U.S. Navy aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS Pennsylvania before beginning his legal career. His military experience included Navy Security Reaction Force training as well as expert pistol and sharpshooter rifle qualifications. He later spent more than six years as an assistant district attorney in Harris County, serving as first chair in 27 trials involving charges including murder, aggravated assault and aggravated robbery. He also served in the Child Sex Crimes Division and as chief prosecutor in two county criminal courts.

Both associates bring something Burdette specifically sought: courtroom experience.

“I didn’t want to just hire the first person whose resume came across my desk,” Burdette says. “My associates are both former prosecutors. They have  trial experience. They’ve seen the other side. They’ve evaluated firearms cases and self-defense cases, and they are criminal law practitioners.”

That ability to see a case from the prosecution’s perspective can be invaluable to a defense lawyer. Prosecutors learn how the government evaluates evidence, where weaknesses in a case may exist, which facts cause concern and what makes a case persuasive to a jury.

Burdette has that perspective. So do Gonzalez and Serrato.

There is real excitement at U.S. LawShield about the team Burdette is building to serve—and, when necessary, defend—Texas members. For someone facing one of the worst days of their life, that breadth of experience is more than impressive résumé material. It’s the level of representation U.S. LawShield members should expect from their South Texas independent program attorney—and the kind of experience they’ll want sitting beside them if their freedom is ever on the line.