McPherson Law Firm PLLC

Focus and practice areas

Environmental law in Texas covers a narrow set of problems, and this Dallas firm works inside that set. McPherson Law Firm PLLC advises individuals and business entities on environmental questions that come up in real estate transactions, in business operations, and in land construction and development.

The service list is concrete. It includes buying, selling, or leasing environmentally sensitive property, cleaning up contaminated property, defending against enforcement actions and penalties, and obtaining waste and air permits along with the compliance work that follows.

Water is the other half of the picture. The firm handles water permits and rights covering both surface water and groundwater, and it takes on water and sewer utility disputes involving Certificates of Convenience and Necessity.

Land use and zoning

Zoning and land use matters sit alongside the environmental work, which makes sense given how often the two collide on a development site. A developer facing a permit question frequently has a zoning question waiting behind it.

The firm also represents parties in environmental rulemaking. That means permit applications, opposing the applications of others, and private complaints and enforcement.

How the team is built

Mark McPherson is the sole attorney at McPherson Law Firm PLLC and its Managing Attorney. Every matter the firm takes runs through him.

His education is on the record. He earned a Bachelor of Science from Belmont University in 1987, graduating cum laude, then a Juris Doctor from Washington & Lee University School of Law in 1990. He was admitted to the State Bar of Texas that same year.

His first five years in practice were at Mankoff, Hill, Held & Goldburg, PC in Dallas. He resigned in 1995 to open his own practice, and over the years since he has narrowed what he takes on until environmental law and water rights account for the work.

What a solo structure means for clients

In my opinion, the single-attorney setup is the most useful fact on the listing. A client who calls about a contaminated parcel or a groundwater permit gets the attorney whose name is on the door, and that attorney has been doing this particular kind of work for a long stretch.

There's a trade in that arrangement, and it's worth naming plainly. A solo practice has a natural ceiling on volume, so the firm's capacity for very large multi-party matters depends on the specifics of the case.

What the record shows

The arithmetic is simple. Bar admission in 1990, five years at another Dallas firm, then his own shingle from 1995 forward. That puts more than three decades of Texas practice behind the current work.

The narrowing matters as much as the duration. A lawyer who starts broad and then trims toward environmental permitting and water rights has made a deliberate choice about where to put the hours, and the site describes exactly that arc.

The site doesn't state a founding year for the PLLC entity itself, only the 1995 date when he began practicing on his own. As a reviewer, I'd read the 1995 date as the meaningful one for continuity of practice.

Who the work suits

The client profile follows from the service list. Buyers and sellers of property with environmental history, businesses that need waste or air permits, developers working through zoning approvals, and parties on either side of a water rights question.

The enforcement defense work points to a second group: entities that have already drawn attention from a regulator and need someone who knows the permitting and rulemaking process from the inside. Defending a penalty action and filing a permit application draw on the same body of knowledge.

The utility disputes angle

Certificates of Convenience and Necessity are a technical corner of Texas utility regulation, and the firm names them directly. CCN disputes decide which provider has the right to serve a given area, and they turn on rules that a general commercial practice would have to learn from scratch.

Groundwater and surface water are governed differently in Texas, and the firm lists both. A landowner with a well and a landowner with a river frontage face different legal frameworks, and the site indicates the firm works across that divide.

How the online presence reads

The firm's site sits at texasenvironmentallaw.com, a domain that tells you the focus before the page loads. The pages carry a consistent firm name, a single Dallas office, and an attorney page with dates and credentials that can be checked against the State Bar.

The practice pages describe services rather than outcomes. For a directory built on verifiable material, that's the useful kind of website: it lists what the firm does, names the lawyer who does it, and gives dates for his education and admission.

No other offices appear on the site, and no additional attorneys are listed. The picture the firm presents is a single Dallas practice with one lawyer working a defined area of Texas regulatory law.

Reading this listing against the evidence

What can be verified here is verifiable in the ordinary way. Bar admission year, law school, undergraduate degree, prior firm, and the year he went out on his own all appear on the attorney page with enough specificity to check.

The practice areas map cleanly onto four categories in our taxonomy: environmental law, environmental compliance and permitting, zoning and land use, and commercial real estate. That last one follows from the transaction work on environmentally sensitive property.

As a reviewer, I find the match between the stated focus and the listed services unusually tight. Firms that claim a specialty often list a dozen unrelated services underneath it. Here the services all belong to the same regulatory world: permits, cleanups, enforcement, water, and the land use questions attached to them.

A prospective client evaluating this firm has a straightforward set of questions to bring to a first conversation. Whether the matter falls inside the permitting and water rights lane, what the timeline looks like given a solo practice, and how the regulatory posture of the matter shapes the approach.

Mark McPherson has held a Texas bar license since 1990 and has run his own practice since 1995, working out of a single Dallas office on environmental and water law.