Isaac Villarreal

Isaac is a double-licensed attorney focusing his practice on domestic litigation and international disputes. He is licensed to practice law in Texas and Mexico and has gained extensive litigation experience in both legal systems.

Prior to joining DBC, Isaac served as law clerk to the Honorable Justice Eva Guzman at the Supreme Court of Texas and to the Honorable Michael Truncale, Federal District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Texas; becoming the first foreign-trained attorney to clerk for the State’s highest court and first to clerk for a federal court. He also worked as a litigation associate for one the world’s largest law firms. His experience in trial and appellate levels provide him a complete picture of the dispute, and being a former insider in the judiciary allows him to sharply represent his clients’ interests in a cost-effective way.

Melissa Carr

Melissa is an experienced trial lawyer, member of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) and a certified mediator. During her eighteen-year career, she has gained extensive trial experience as managing in-house counsel for an insurance company, head litigation attorney for a plaintiffs’ firm, and partner at a mid-size firm before joining DBC. Melissa strives to educate and empower her clients to make the best decisions before, during and after the litigation process. She handles all kinds of civil litigation matters including commercial litigation, business and partnership disputes, construction defects, employment discrimination, premises liability, insurance coverage matters, contract disputes, real estate disputes, and personal injury.

David Hartman

David Hartman has a diversified land use and real estate development practice, including experience in a broad range of land development permitting, entitlement, and natural resource issues on behalf of landowners and developers. His practice focuses on the representation of clients in the areas of zoning, planning, and entitlements law, including representation before city councils, boards, commissions, and other governmental entities. He has worked on diverse real estate projects, including a variety of multifamily, mixed use projects, single family residential and master planned projects, hotels, office buildings, vacant land, and condominiums, among others. He represents some of the most active multifamily developers in Central Texas, and has unique experience in vested development rights/grandfathering, public-private partnerships, development agreements, annexation, and Board of Adjustment variances. His practice encompasses environmental and regulatory compliance issues arising under the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and other natural resource regulatory matters. He has extensive experience in all aspects of conservation transactions, including both fee title acquisitions and conservation easement conveyances, along with conservation banking and related funding mechanisms and programs for conservation acquisitions. Years of working in and around local, county, state, and federal governmental agencies and legislative bodies (both prior to and after obtaining his law degree) allows him to offer clients unique insights to their dealings with governmental entities and related regulatory matters.

Mona Ghogomu

Mona focuses her practice on a variety of real estate and commercial transactions including the sale and acquisition of developed and undeveloped land, leasing (tenant and landlord representation), development and subdivision of property for residential, commercial, and mixed-use purposes, and entity formation. Mona’s training at a large international firm, and experience working abroad representing large public and private sector clients enables her to bring a well-balanced perspective to any deal. Born and raised Down Under, Mona is both a proud Australian and delighted to call Austin home.

Rose Hargrave

Rose focuses her practice on transactional law with a concentration on real estate, land development, corporate, and governmental matters. She draws on her experience as an elected official, business owner, and in-house counsel to help clients achieve their business and land development needs.

With a lifelong emphasis on public service, Rose has clerked in the Texas supreme court for criminal matters, assisted in the creation of the Texas Criminal Justice Integrity Unit, and served a 12-year run as an elected official in Sunset Valley—ten of those years as the Mayor where she was the chief officer for the public works and police department and responsible for filing the City’s annual budget. She can maneuver local government and instinctively knows how to communicate with public officials, city staff, and stakeholders. She’s also led land development work as in-house counsel for a design-build architecture firm that managed turn-key land development projects.

Prior to joining DBC, Rose owned a boutique law firm for a decade that focused on assisting companies navigate and improve their: internal operations, governance, human resources, investor needs, regulatory applications, compliance, and due diligence reviews. Her role was to provide efficiencies and cost-appropriate solutions that larger firms were not agile enough to provide. She hails from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas which she credits for her passion and drive in all things community and advocacy based. She completed her undergraduate degree in Valparaiso, Chile and worked in international education prior to law school.

Rose represents:
• Land Developers and stakeholders with zoning, use and entitlement needs
• C-suite and organization leaders for operational efficiencies
• Landlords and tenants with commercial leases
• Architects, contractors and owners with transactional needs
• Corporations with general counsel needs

When not working, Rose serves to conserve land, improve water quality and quantity, and build trail systems as a Board member of Hill Country Conservancy. She loves on her daughters and standard poodles when at home, and lives for a good horse adventure.

Taylor Bell

Taylor focuses her practice on a variety of corporate and transactional matters, including entity formation, corporate governance issues, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate restructuring. Taylor also has experience with commercial and residential real estate matters, where she has drafted and negotiated transaction documents and advised clients on related entity formation and financing issues.

Taylor Hedrick

Taylor’s practice focuses on advising his clients on a wide range of corporate and financial transactions, including acquisitions and divestitures, formation of venture capital funds and private equity funds and corporate restructuring and reorganization. He also provides counsel on a variety of general corporate and transactional matters, including corporate governance, distribution and marketing agreements, lease agreements, key agreements with customers and vendors, management, consulting and service agreements and other commercial agreements.

Harry Jung

Harry focuses his practice with a concentration on commercial real estate transactions, including leasing (tenant and landlord), acquisitions, dispositions, financing and real estate development. His practice includes representation of lenders and borrowers in a multitude of different commercial real estate loan transactions. Harry has also represented clients in a variety of multi-family, retail, office and mixed-use transactions.

Austin Dula

Austin’s practice focuses in corporate law with an emphasis in intellectual property (“IP”) and IP related transactions. Austin clients has represented include high-tech goods and service providers operating in a broad array of technology fields, consumer products companies, literary estates, and brand developers.

Austin is deeply involved in all aspects of the development and commercialization of intellectual property. He helps clients identify, protect, cultivate, and leverage their IP assets in the U.S. and internationally. Austin’s experience includes the registration and enforcement of trademarks and copyrights, assisting with the drafting, prosecution, and licensing of patents, identifying and protecting trade secrets, and conducting IP-related due diligence.

In addition to traditional intellectual property counseling, Austin has expertise in the rapidly evolving fields of privacy and Internet law, including handling domain name and cybersquatting disputes, along with counseling clients on all aspects of handling personal information, conducting e-commerce, and commercializing creative online content.

Austin regularly operates as an outside general counsel for his clients, counseling them on every-day legal matters and performing general contract work, including entity formation and corporate structuring, licensing, corporate compliance, and dispute resolution; as well as drafting and negotiating employee agreements, SaaS agreements, terms of service, privacy policies, franchise agreements, buy/sell agreements, and other such transactional legal documents.

Heather Smith

Heather is a finance and real estate attorney with over 20 years of experience negotiating, documenting and closing large and small commercial credit facilities and other lending transactions.
She has represented administrative agents, syndication agents, lenders, borrowers and private equity sponsors in a variety of deals, including:
• secured and unsecured credit facilities,
• real estate loans,
• sports venue financings,
• asset based lending,
• mergers and acquisitions,
• syndicated credit facilities,
• bilateral credit facilities,
• subscription line credit facilities,
• equipment and project finance,
• lease financings,
• mezzanine financings,
• subordination and intercreditor arrangements,
• credit facilities guaranteed by the Export-Import Bank of the United States,
• loan participations, and
• loan restructurings, workouts and bankruptcy debtor-in-possession credit facilities.

She has also represented buyers and sellers of commercial real estate.

Heather has represented clients in deals for various industries, including amateur and professional sports (football, soccer, baseball, basketball and auto racing), entertainment, manufacturing, real estate, restaurants, gas stations and convenience stores, retail and technology.