About
Will Barnette is associate general counsel for The Home Depot and is a member of the company’s legal senior leadership team. He leads the company’s commercial litigation team, which has responsibility for The Home Depot’s most significant commercial and business litigation, including consumer class actions, IP disputes, antitrust, vendor and customer disputes, tax, and shareholder matters. In addition, he frequently manages high-stakes internal investigations and regulatory inquiries for the company.

Prior to his current position, Barnette was responsible for managing The Home Depot’s class action and other complex commercial litigation. In that role, over a decade he led the successful defense of more than 200 class actions. He also created a recovery project through which The Home Depot identifies significant opportunities to participate in class settlements or pursue opt-out litigation, resulting in a number of large recoveries for the Company.

Barnette manages The Home Depot’s third-party discovery response team and the legal function that supports The Home Depot’s outside sales and services, pro, and rental business teams. He also founded, and co-chairs with the company’s general counsel, The Home Depot’s Investigations Council.

Barnette is one of the few in-house counsel to have argued before the United States Supreme Court, which he did in 2019 in Home Depot v. Jackson. Mr. Barnette was named a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America in 2017. In 2016, he won the Corporate Counsel Award for Advocacy given by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and the Association of Corporate Counsel Georgia Chapter. In 2014, he won the First Chair Award for Top Litigation Counsel. Prior to joining The Home Depot, he worked on mass torts and class action defense with King & Spalding LLP.

He is the author of seven law review articles, the most recent two of which (There is No Conservative Case for Class Actions and Misunderstanding Original Jurisdiction) were both ranked in the top ten downloads for Federal Courts and Jurisdiction on SSRN. Finally, he has been an adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law since 2023.