We are business and commercial litigators. We have been doing this work in Dallas since 1994. We were here before the firms that opened their Dallas offices in the last five years, and we will be here after the ones that close them in the next five. Our clients have ranged from Fortune 500 companies to family-owned businesses, and the litigation we handle for them has ranged from seven-figure trade secret fights to focused contract disputes that need to be resolved quickly and cleanly.
This page is about how we work. Not the legal substance, every other page on this site covers a specific area of substantive Texas business litigation law. This page is the answer to the question prospects actually ask in the first consultation: what kind of firm are you and how do you handle cases?
Here is the honest answer.
We move fast
The single most important variable in most business litigation cases is the speed of the response. That is true on the plaintiff side, where the party that files first picks the venue, frames the dispute, and forces the timeline. It is true on the defendant side, where the answer deadline is short and the period between service and the deadline is when many of the most important strategic decisions get made. And it is especially true in cases involving emergency relief, temporary restraining orders, temporary injunctions, asset freeze orders, where the window for stopping bad-actor conduct closes quickly.
Our clients call us and we answer. We respond to emails the same day, including evenings and most weekends. We open files in days, not weeks. When a TRO has to be on file by Friday because the bad actor’s wire transfer is going out Monday, we file it. When an answer is due in seven days because the client only just called, we answer it.
This is not heroism. It is the only way to do this work properly. The firms that take three weeks to open a file and two more weeks to draft an initial pleading are operating on a different business model. That model may work for them. It does not work for the cases we take.
We file first when filing first makes sense
Most experienced commercial litigators agree that the party that gets to the courthouse first has a meaningful advantage. The first filer is the plaintiff, picks the proper venue from among the available choices, frames the narrative the court will see first, and forces the other side to react. The party that waits is the defendant, lives with the venue the plaintiff chose, and spends the early months of the case playing defense.
We have watched clients lose months of strategic advantage because they wanted to “try to work it out first” or “give them one more chance.” Sometimes that is the right call. When the other side is genuinely negotiating in good faith, holding off on filing preserves the relationship and saves money. We tell clients to do that when it fits the facts.
But when the relationship is past saving, when the other side is moving assets, when the statute of limitations is closing in, or when the strategic value of being the plaintiff is significant, waiting is a mistake. In those cases, we file. Quickly. With the right pleadings, in the right venue, and with the right emergency motions queued up if needed.
The clients who get the most value out of this firm are the ones who call early enough that filing first is still an option.
We try to settle cases when settlement is in the client’s interest
This is where we differ from a meaningful number of Dallas business litigators.
The vast majority of Texas business cases settle before trial. Most settle at or shortly after mediation. The court system is designed to encourage settlement, most district courts in the busy Texas counties will order the parties to mediate before allowing the case to go to trial, and the economics of business litigation favor settlement in most cases.
We have never had a client call us six months after settling a case and complain that they settled. We have had many clients call us six months after declining a settlement and ask how things ended up costing so much more than the settlement number.
That said, settlement is not always in the client’s interest. Some cases need to be tried. Some cases involve principal questions about how the firm and its key people are going to be treated going forward, where the deterrent effect of a verdict matters more than the settlement value. Some defendants will not pay anything until they see that the case is actually going to trial.
Our job is to evaluate each case honestly, tell the client what we think, and let the client make the call. What we will not do is run a case toward trial because trial is how the lawyer makes the most money. If you intend to run a cost-effective lawsuit, raise this topic with the lawyers you are interviewing. Some firms will be evasive about it. We will not.
We manage discovery aggressively
Discovery is the most expensive phase of a Texas business case. Discovery costs frequently exceed the value of the underlying dispute when nobody is managing them. We have seen contract cases worth $200,000 generate discovery bills of $400,000 on each side because the lawyers either did not know how to limit the scope of discovery or did not care to.
We manage discovery in our cases with the goal of producing the evidence we actually need for trial, and nothing else. That means pushing back on overbroad document requests rather than producing every email anyone in the company has ever sent. It means deposing the witnesses who matter rather than deposing everyone the other side names. It means selecting experts carefully and using them efficiently, not running up the expert bill because the expert charges by the hour and is happy to keep working.
It also means having frank conversations with clients about the cost-benefit of each discovery decision. Every deposition is a strategic choice with a cost attached. Every request for production is a choice about what we want to find and what we are willing to pay to get it. The clients who fare best in business litigation are the ones who engage with those choices instead of leaving them entirely to the lawyer.
We pursue Chapter 38 attorney’s fees
One of Texas’s signature features for commercial litigation is fee shifting in breach of contract cases under Chapter 38 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The prevailing party in a Texas breach of contract case can recover reasonable attorney’s fees from the losing party.
We build our cases from day one with the fee recovery in mind. That means presenting the claim properly under the pre-suit notice requirements of Chapter 38. It means keeping contemporaneous fee records that will survive scrutiny. It means thinking about which of the available claims actually qualifies for fee shifting and which does not, and structuring the case to maximize the fee recovery if we win.
Fee recovery is not free money. The fee award has to be reasonable and necessary. The case has to actually prevail. And Chapter 38 cuts both ways, if the case loses, the other side can claim fees against us. We weigh that risk before we recommend filing, and we are honest with clients when the risk of being on the wrong side of fee shifting tips the calculus against suit.
But in the right case, fee shifting changes the economics dramatically. A $150,000 contract claim is a different decision when the legal fees come out of the breaching party’s pocket instead of yours.
We tell the truth about cost
We tell clients early what we think the case will cost, what settlement looks like at each stage, and when continued litigation stops being worth the spend.
This is harder than it sounds. Most law firms do not give cost estimates because it is genuinely difficult to predict how a contested case will develop and because clients sometimes hear estimates as promises. We give the estimates anyway, with the caveats, because clients deserve to make informed decisions and because the lawyers who refuse to estimate are usually the ones whose bills surprise the client at the wrong moment.
The estimates change as the case develops. A case that looked like it would settle at mediation and instead is going to trial costs more than the original estimate. We update the estimates and we explain why. A case that resolves on a Rule 91a motion in the first 90 days costs less. We track that against the estimate too.
What we do not do is run the cost calculus quietly while the client is unaware of the trajectory. Surprise legal bills are how lawyer-client relationships end badly. We avoid that ending.
We are honest about what we are not
We are not a huge law firm. We never have been. The firm has been small enough since 1994 to make decisions quickly and execute them without committee approval. We can answer client emails on weekends because there are not so many of us that an email gets lost in routing.
That smaller size means there are kinds of cases that are not the right fit here. Multi-jurisdictional class actions with hundreds of plaintiffs are not what we do. The kind of bet-the-company defense work that requires a team of fifty associates to do document review on a six-month timeline is not what we do. If your case needs the AmLaw 200 staffing model, we are not the firm for that.
What we do is Texas business litigation handled by experienced lawyers who have been doing it together for a long time. Direct representation. Fast decisions. Honest assessments. Aggressive when the case calls for it and cost-conscious when it does not.
Because of our insistence on aggressive representation and our requirement that clients engage honestly with the cost-benefit decisions in litigation, not everyone can be a client. We turn away cases that do not fit. That is not a marketing line. It is how we keep the work that comes through this firm at the standard we expect of ourselves.
If the work that comes out of this firm sounds like what you are looking for, give us a chance to review your situation. The first conversation is free. We will tell you whether we think we can help, what the case looks like from the outside, and what we would do in the first sixty days if we took it on. If we are not the right firm for the case, we will tell you that and point you somewhere better.
How to engage us
If you have a business dispute that has reached the point of needing counsel, the most useful thing you can do is call us before the situation gets worse. Things almost always get worse. The question is how much position you give up before you start fighting back.
Call 214-368-4686, fill out the form on this page, or send a direct email to one of the attorneys you have read about on this site. We answer.
For the substantive treatment of specific kinds of Texas business cases, see the practice cluster pages linked in the navigation above and in the sidebar.