de Beaubien, Simmons, Knight, Mantzaris & Neal, LLP

Focus and practice areas

The firm works under the legal name de Beaubien, Simmons, Knight, Mantzaris & Neal, LLP, and it brands its work as Florida business and insurance law. The home page lists more than 50 attorneys and over 40 areas of law. That breadth gives the firm room to handle both company-side matters and personal legal needs under one roof.

Insurance litigation sits closest to the firm's own branding. Alongside it the site lists real estate, corporate and transactional work, commercial and business litigation, and bankruptcy. The firm also handles first-party property damage defense. First-party property claims arise when a policyholder seeks payment under their own policy after damage to a home or building, so this is a defined corner of insurance practice.

On the personal side, the firm covers divorce and family law, immigration, criminal defense and traffic court, employment and civil rights, and personal injury litigation. It lists estate planning, probate, and elder law, plus appeals and local government and municipal law. In my opinion, that mix reads as a firm that wants a client's business matter and family matter to stay in the same building.

How the team is built

The firm names three founding partners: Hugo H. de Beaubien, David H. Simmons, and Kevin Knight. Their surnames sit at the front of the legal name, which is common for a partnership built around the people who started it.

The partner roster the site publishes runs deeper than those three. It names Daniel F. Mantzaris and Thomas F. Neal, whose surnames also appear in the full legal name. It lists D. John Morgeson, Jr., Kenneth P. Hazouri, Yvette Rodriguez Brown, Daniel J. O'Malley, Bart R. Valdes, Lindsay N. Greene, and Deborah I. Mitchell as partners.

Yvette Rodriguez Brown is also the firm's ADA coordinator, going by the contact the site lists for that role. The full attorney bios sit behind separate links, so a reader who wants law schools and admission years has to open each profile. The listing here covers the names and titles the firm makes public.

Where the firm keeps offices

DSK Law runs three offices in Florida: Orlando, Tampa, and Melbourne. Orlando is the central base, and the legal name appears on both the Orlando page and the attorney pages.

The three-city footprint covers a stretch of Central Florida and the Space Coast. For a client, that means the firm can take a matter in the Orlando area, the Tampa area, or the Melbourne area and keep it in house. A larger partnership spread over three cities also lets the firm move a file to whichever attorney fits the subject.

What the record of service shows

The firm marks about 50 years of service. A video on the site, dated November 2025, celebrates 49 years, and the home page uses the round figure of 50 years. The site does not state an exact founding year, so the anniversary count is the clearest marker of the firm's age.

The Tampa office reached its own milestone in 2025, when the firm noted 20 years of service there. As a reviewer, I read that as a sign the firm opened its second office two decades ago and has kept it running since. The firm also describes itself as one of Central Florida's larger firms, which lines up with the attorney count it publishes.

How the main practice areas tend to work

Insurance litigation, one of the firm's headline areas, usually turns on the wording of a policy and the facts of a loss. These cases can settle through negotiation, or they can move to a courtroom when the two sides read the same policy differently. First-party property damage defense fits inside that work, on the insurer's side of the claim.

Commercial and business litigation covers disputes between companies, such as contract fights and partnership disagreements. Much of the early effort happens in written discovery and document review before any trial date. The corporate and transactional side handles the other end of that timeline, when a business forms or changes hands and needs the paperwork done right the first time.

Family law and divorce matters follow Florida's own process, which runs through the state's circuit courts. Property division, parenting plans, and support all get decided there. Probate and estate work moves on a separate track, where a court oversees how an estate passes after a death. Criminal defense and traffic court cases each keep to the schedule the court sets, from a first appearance through resolution.

Publishing and public content

The firm publishes short articles on its site, and the topics track its practice list. Recent pieces touch probate, DUI, commercial property, and family and medical leave. That range of writing matches a firm that carries both business files and personal-matter files.

For a client comparing options, the public material gives a fair read on scope. The named partners, the three offices, and the practice list are all stated plainly on the firm's pages. What the site holds back, such as full bios and a general contact email, a client can ask for at first contact.

Size and reach in short

Put together, the public facts describe a mid-to-large Florida firm with a business and insurance core and a wide civil and personal caseload around it. The named partners give the firm a settled leadership group, and the three offices spread its reach across Central Florida and toward the coast. The firm's own count is more than 50 attorneys across over 40 areas of law.

Attorneys who have held public office

Some of the firm's partners have carried public roles alongside their legal work. David H. Simmons, one of the founding partners, was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2000 and to the Florida Senate in 2010, and through those years he kept a commercial litigation practice that handled complex commercial and real estate disputes. Daniel F. Mantzaris is a former Assistant County Attorney for Seminole County. He is now City Attorney for the City of St. Cloud and the City of Clermont, and he is counsel to several local code enforcement boards. That government work sits close to the local government and municipal law the firm lists as a practice area.

Board certification and appellate reach

A few of the attorneys hold board certification from The Florida Bar, a credential that marks experience in a defined field. Kevin Knight, a founding partner, is board certified as a civil trial lawyer. Kenneth P. Hazouri is Board Certified in Appellate Practice, and he focuses his work on civil and commercial litigation at the trial and appellate levels. Appellate practice is its own discipline, since it turns on the written record and the law that applies to it.

The firm's appellate work has reached the higher courts. Brett J. Miller, the founding and managing partner of the Melbourne office, has presented oral argument before the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal. The Eleventh Circuit is the federal appeals court that covers Florida, and the Fifth District Court of Appeal is one of Florida's own appellate courts. Deborah I. Mitchell brings a different courtroom background. Before joining the firm she was an Assistant State Attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit, where she handled criminal and traffic prosecutions, and her practice now runs through state and federal courts at the trial and appellate levels.

Where the partners trained

The named partners studied at a range of law schools. Hugo H. de Beaubien earned his Juris Doctor from Stetson University in 1973, and Kevin Knight also studied at Stetson, where he was Executive Editor of the Law Review. David H. Simmons took his degree from Vanderbilt University in 1977. Daniel F. Mantzaris and Thomas F. Neal both hold degrees from the University of Florida. In my reading, that spread of schools and graduation years matches a partnership that has added lawyers across several decades.