The Daves Law Firm

Focus and practice areas

Three lines of work anchor this Austin office: real estate, estate planning, and probate. Those areas overlap more than they might appear to. A family that owns rental property in Travis County will eventually need all three.

The real estate side is broad within its lane. The firm handles deeds and deed transfers, purchase and sale agreements, contracts, private lending, seller financing, and foreclosures. It also forms business entities: LLCs, series LLCs, joint ventures, and partnerships. Condominium regimes are on the list too, which is a fairly technical corner of Texas property practice.

Estate planning covers wills, trusts, medical directives, and powers of attorney. Probate and trust administration work follows from that, with the firm representing executors, beneficiaries, and trustees.

How the real estate work fits together

Seller financing and private lending are worth flagging because they sit outside the ordinary bank-mortgage path. In a seller-financed sale, the seller holds the note and the buyer pays the seller directly. The paperwork has to do double duty: it records the sale and creates an enforceable debt with a lien behind it.

Texas puts specific requirements around these deals, and a badly drafted note can leave a seller with a property they cannot easily take back. A firm that also handles foreclosures sees the far end of that process. In my opinion, that combination matters. The attorney who drafts the note has seen what happens when one goes wrong.

Entity formation and property

The series LLC deserves a note. Texas allows a single LLC to create internal series, each holding its own assets with its own liability shield. Investors with several rental properties use the structure to keep one property's problems away from the others.

Setting one up correctly means separate records and separate accounting per series, because sloppy bookkeeping can undo the separation. Since the firm does both entity formation and the underlying real estate transfers, the deeds and the entity paperwork can be drafted to match.

Landlord work and evictions

The firm assists landlords with evictions and other property management matters. Texas eviction suits start in justice court and move quickly by civil litigation standards. A notice to vacate comes first, then the petition, then a hearing scheduled within a short statutory window.

Appeals go to county court for a fresh trial. The compressed timeline means the notice period and the service details carry real weight. A defect at the notice stage often means starting over, so the early paperwork tends to decide the case.

Property management questions reach beyond eviction: security deposit accounting, lease terms, repair obligations, and how a landlord responds to a tenant's written repair request. The firm's coverage of these matters sits alongside its transactional real estate work.

Wills, trusts, and the documents that go with them

Estate planning here covers four named instruments. A will directs what happens to property after death. A trust can hold and manage property during life and after it, and it usually keeps those assets out of the probate court's hands.

Medical directives and powers of attorney handle a different problem. They cover the period when someone is alive and unable to decide for themselves. Texas recognizes a directive to physicians, a medical power of attorney, and a statutory durable power of attorney for financial matters. Each addresses a distinct authority, and most complete plans include more than one.

What probate representation involves

The firm represents executors, beneficiaries, and trustees through the phases of estate administration, from the first probate application through final settlement. Texas independent administration, once the court grants it, lets an executor act with limited further court supervision. That reduces cost and delay compared with dependent administration.

Getting there still takes a court appearance, an order admitting the will, letters testamentary, an inventory of assets, and notice to creditors and beneficiaries. Trustees face a parallel set of duties under the trust instrument and the Texas Trust Code: accounting to beneficiaries, keeping trust property separate, and following the distribution terms as written.

Representing a beneficiary is a different posture than representing the executor. The interests can diverge, and a firm that does both kinds of work sees the dispute from either chair.

How the team is built

The site names three attorneys: John M. Daves, Lori P. Daves, and Christopher P. Daves. The shared surname points to a family practice, though the website as reviewed does not spell out the relationships or assign practice areas to individual attorneys.

Three attorneys across real estate, estate planning, and probate makes for a small office with a defined scope. As a reviewer, I read that as a firm where a client is likely to speak with an attorney rather than move through layers of staff. The named-attorney roster is itself useful information for anyone comparing options, since plenty of firm websites list no attorneys at all.

Where the firm works

The firm serves clients in Austin and the surrounding areas, naming Travis, Hays, and Williamson Counties. That footprint covers the Austin metro and the fast-growing suburban counties north and south of it.

Geography carries weight in this kind of practice. Probate filings go to the county where the decedent lived, and Travis County has a statutory probate court while Hays and Williamson handle probate through their county courts at law. Deed records, property tax matters, and eviction suits are all county-level too, each with its own clerk's office and local filing habits.

A firm working across three adjacent counties deals with three sets of those procedures on a regular basis. For property investors holding parcels across the metro, that reach lines up with how their portfolios are actually spread.

What the listing shows

What the website supports is clear enough: three named attorneys, three connected practice areas described with specific services, and a defined three-county service area. The site does not state a founding year, and it does not publish attorney biographies, law schools, or bar admission dates on the pages reviewed.

For anyone evaluating this firm, the useful signal is the service list itself. Condominium regimes, series LLCs, and seller financing are named individually, which tells a prospective client what the office actually does day to day. The firm's website is thedaveslawfirm.com.