Sammis Law Firm, P.A.

A practice limited to criminal defense

Criminal defense is the entire focus here. The firm's six attorneys work only on criminal matters in the greater Tampa Bay area, and that narrow scope is worth noting from the start. A group that turns away civil and family work tends to spend its days in the same courtrooms, in front of the same judges.

The firm is set up as Sammis Law Firm, P.A., based in Tampa, Florida. In my opinion, the clearest signal on its website is the choice to name each attorney and state plainly what the group handles. There is no attempt to look like a full-service firm that does a bit of everything.

Focus and practice areas

The listed practice areas cover most of what a Florida criminal court deals with day to day. They include driving under the influence, drug crimes, theft and property crimes, and violent crimes. Domestic violence battery and sex offenses sit on the list as well.

The firm also handles white collar crime, firearm charges, juvenile defense, and violation of probation. Sealing or expunging a criminal record is part of the work too. That last area matters to people who finished a case years ago and now want an old charge off their record.

Read together, the list leans toward the charges that move through Florida county and circuit courts in volume, from a first DUI stop to a felony drug case. It also reaches into areas that need careful handling, such as sex offenses and white collar matters, where the stakes and the paperwork both climb. The mix points to a general criminal defense practice rather than one narrow niche.

From citations to felonies

Cases run the full range from misdemeanors to felonies. The firm also takes Hillsborough County ordinance violations and municipal citations issued by cities such as Tampa, Plant City, and Temple Terrace. Handling both a city citation and a serious felony under one roof tells you the group is built to meet people wherever their charge falls.

How the team is built

Six attorneys are named on the site. Jason D. Sammis, Leslie M. Sammis, and Joshua Monteiro are listed as shareholders. Katherine A. Aranda, Jocelyn Dopson-Rodriguez, and Ricardo De Lucca are listed as associates.

The pages we reviewed do not publish bios, law schools, or bar admission years, so a reader cannot check individual backgrounds from the website alone. What the structure does show is a firm large enough to share work across several lawyers while staying inside one field. As a reviewer, I read the shareholder and associate split as a sign of a settled, ongoing practice rather than a single lawyer working alone.

A team of this size also means a case does not rest on one person's calendar. For a defendant with a trial date that cannot move, that kind of depth on staff can matter.

Where the firm works

The main office sits in downtown Tampa, a few blocks from the courthouse. For a criminal defense practice, that location is a practical detail, since so much of the work happens at the courthouse itself.

Two further offices widen the reach. One is in Clearwater, in Pinellas County, and another is in New Port Richey, in Pasco County. Across those locations, the firm says it takes cases in Hillsborough, Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Manatee, and Polk counties. That is a defined stretch of west-central Florida rather than a vague claim to serve the whole state.

The firm also says its phones are answered at all hours. That fits the reality of criminal cases, because arrests do not keep to a schedule, and early contact with a lawyer can shape what happens next.

What the listing shows

Measured against the VerifiedLawFirms standard of evidence over advertising, this listing holds up on the basics. The firm states who its lawyers are and which charges it takes, and it names the counties it covers. Those are checkable facts, not slogans.

Some details are missing. No founding year appears on the pages we read, and there are no published bios to fill in each attorney's track record. A reader who wants to weigh years of experience or past results would need to ask the firm directly.

In my opinion, the firm comes across as a focused, multi-lawyer criminal defense practice serving a clear set of counties around Tampa Bay. For someone facing a misdemeanor or felony in one of the six counties named, what the firm does, and where it does it, is easy to understand from the listing alone.