Barry grew up in Texas and graduated from the University of Texas Law School (Austin) in 1986. He was admitted to the bar in 1987 and since then has practiced mainly in complex civil litigation, including constitutional law, and nonprofit law. He has been an allied attorney with the Alliance for Defending Freedom since 1994. He served in the Colorado legislature in the 1990s. Some of his cases have been in the news. In 1999, he began representing several of the families whose children were killed at Columbine. In 2020, he represented a Colorado church in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court. His firm won that case and succeeded in opening the churches, which Colorado had shut down during COVID. He discusses his experiences with those cases in the book, Unforgetting God: Defeating Culture-Destroying Materialism Through Christian Renewal. He has been involved in the intelligent design movement for many years. He ran the intelligent design website, UncommonDescent.com for well over a decade, which in its hey day was the largest intelligent design discussion site on the internet. In 2023, the decision was made to shut the website down and archive it at Discovery Institute’s website.