Fort Worth owner-transaction counsel, without the tower.
For Tarrant County business owners, the practice’s Fort Worth work is deliberately specific: the owner’s side of transactions, sales, acquisitions, partner changes, exit preparation, plus the fractional GC layer for companies in between deals. Boardroom-grade experience, one county west, at a different cost structure.
The owner's side of the deal
Fort Worth has no shortage of law firms. What owners of privately held companies often lack is counsel whose center of gravity is their side of the transaction: the years-early exit-readiness work, the valuation posture, the sale process from decision to close, and the five seller decisions that determine net proceeds. That is this practice’s core, built on both-sides M&A experience, and it travels the thirty-five miles to Tarrant County without friction.
Between transactions, the fractional general counsel model gives growing Fort Worth companies the embedded counsel layer at a defined monthly cost, and the Business Court’s Eighth Division, seated here, makes disciplined transaction documents worth more than ever.
The Business Court is here
The Eighth Division of the Texas Business Court keeps its chambers in Fort Worth. Two judges, Jerry Bullard in Division 8A and Brian Stagner in Division 8B, hear qualifying commercial disputes out of eighteen North Texas counties, Tarrant among them. Both were reappointed on July 29, 2026 for terms running to September 2028. Neither arrived from a trial bench. Bullard came from an appellate practice at Adams, Lynch & Loftin and sits on the Texas Supreme Court Advisory Committee; Stagner came from Kelly Hart & Hallman and teaches business law at TCU.
Below it sit Tarrant County's ten civil district courts, the 17th, 48th, 67th, 96th, 141st, 153rd, 236th, 342nd, 348th and 352nd, all of them in the Tom Vandergriff Civil Courts Building on North Calhoun. When a removal to the Business Court fails, that is where the case lands. In TEMA Oil and Gas v. ETC Field Services, 2024 Tex. Bus. 3, the division's first published opinion, Judge Bullard sent exactly such a case back to the 236th.
Worth knowing before you plan around it: that remand could not be appealed. The Fifteenth Court of Appeals dismissed the attempt for want of jurisdiction, holding that no statute authorises an interlocutory appeal of a business court remand order and that such an order is not a final judgment. The decision to remove is one you make once.
It is a quiet court, and that is the argument
In the fiscal year ending August 2025 the Eighth Division received twenty cases. The Houston division took seventy-nine and Dallas fifty-two, out of 185 statewide. Twelve of the twenty were filed here originally and eight arrived by removal.
That is a low-volume court and there is no honest way to dress it up as anything else. What it is not is a reason to avoid the place. Twenty cases across a full year, split between two appellate-trained judges, is a docket where a written opinion is the norm rather than the exception and where a motion gets read by the person deciding it. Compare that to a general civil docket carrying several hundred matters of every description.
The published record bears it out. Twenty-four opinions have issued from this division since November 2024, and all of them are indexed here, with what each one holds. Ten of the twenty-four never reached the merits. That ratio is the most useful thing a Tarrant County business can know before deciding whether to move a case.
What Tarrant County actually builds, and the contracts that follow
Fort Worth passed a million residents and is now the tenth largest city in the United States, and the fastest-growing of the thirty largest since 2020. Tarrant County is at roughly 2.25 million. But the size is less interesting than the shape.
The county's largest private employer is Lockheed Martin, around 18,700 people at Air Force Plant 4 building the F-35. Bell is headquartered here and put $632 million and 520 jobs into a Fort Worth expansion in December 2024. American Airlines is headquartered on Skyview Drive. AllianceTexas, north of the city, now spans 27,000 acres and 602 companies. General Motors assembles in Arlington, BNSF runs its railroad from here, and JPS and Texas Health Harris Methodist each employ several thousand.
One correction to the received story, because it turns up on a lot of law firm pages: Fort Worth is not an energy town any more. The Barnett Shale made it one for a decade and no energy company appears in the county's top ten employers today. Aerospace, defence, logistics and healthcare are what is actually here.
That mix produces a particular kind of legal work. Long-cycle supply agreements with aerospace primes where the terms are dictated and the question is which ones you can actually move. Distribution and warehousing contracts out of Alliance. Manufacturing joint ventures. And a steady flow of arrivals, Siemens with a $190 million hub and 800 jobs in 2025, Collins Aerospace, McMaster-Carr's regional headquarters, Rhino Health relocating its headquarters from New Mexico, each of which brings a company doing Texas entity work, Texas contracts and Texas governance for the first time.
Deliberately narrow, and one county west
I do the owner's side of transactions. Selling or buying a company, buy-sell architecture among owners, fractional general counsel for a company that has outgrown having no lawyer, corporate governance, and cross-border work between the United States and Canada, where I am admitted in Alberta as well as Texas.
Real estate, employment and trademark registration go to colleagues at Scale LLP. I am a partner there, so the referral is generally to someone on the same email rather than to a stranger.
The office is in Granbury, forty miles southwest, which is a deliberate choice rather than an accident. A downtown tower carries a cost structure that has to be recovered from somebody, and for transactional work the meetings that matter happen at your conference table or on a screen. When a Fort Worth courtroom or a Fort Worth boardroom needs someone in the room, it is a forty-minute drive.
Common questions
For the specific work this page describes: owner transactions and ongoing counsel where what matters is the mileage of the person doing the work, not the address of the tower. Twenty-five years of corporate practice, three public company GC tours, and both sides of acquisition work, at a cost structure a downtown firm's overhead cannot match. When a matter does call for a large local team, Scale LLP's bench serves exactly that, through the same relationship.
The owner's side of the deal: preparing a company for sale years ahead, the valuation and exit-readiness work, the LOI and diligence phases where price quietly moves, purchase agreement negotiation, and the seller's decisions that determine net proceeds. Buy-side for owners acquiring competitors or bolting on capability. And the ownership architecture in between: buy-sell agreements, partner buy-ins and buyouts, recapitalizations.
For qualifying commercial cases, the Eighth Division, seated in Fort Worth, brings specialized judges and written opinions to disputes that used to grind through general dockets. For owners and boards in its jurisdiction it is changing how governance and deal disputes get decided, and this site tracks its opinions as they issue. It is also a reason transaction documents drafted today should be written with that forum in mind.
Yes. The Eighth Division keeps chambers in Fort Worth and covers eighteen North Texas counties including Tarrant, Denton, Parker, Johnson and Hood. It does not have its own courthouse; hearings and trials have been held in borrowed space. No street address is published.
Not very. It received twenty cases in the fiscal year ending August 2025, against seventy-nine in Houston and fifty-two in Dallas, out of 185 statewide. For a party with a qualifying dispute that is an argument in favour of the forum rather than against it.
No. The Fifteenth Court of Appeals held in ETC Field Services v. TEMA Oil and Gas that no statute authorises an interlocutory appeal of a business court remand order and that such an order is not a final judgment. It dismissed the appeal for want of jurisdiction. Treat removal as a decision you make once.
Cost structure, mostly. Downtown overhead has to be recovered from someone, and for owner-side transactional work the location of the lawyer's desk matters far less than whether he has done the thing before. Fort Worth is forty minutes away when being in the room is what the matter needs.
The deal of your life deserves counsel who has done it for a living.
The words you'll hear
If this goes further, these are the terms that will come up, from us or from the other side. Each one links to a fuller explanation.
- Texas Business Court
- A specialized statewide trial court created in 2023 to hear complex commercial disputes involving corporate governance, fiduciary duties, derivative actions, securities law, and qualified transactions.
- Qualified Transaction
- A qualified transaction is the deal-size trigger that pulls a contract dispute into the Texas Business Court.
- Amount in Controversy
- The amount in controversy is the money genuinely at stake when the suit is filed, and it is the gatekeeper for the Texas Business Court.
- Remand
- Remand sends a removed case back to the district court or county court at law where it started.
- Forum Selection Clause
- A forum selection clause fixes in advance where disputes will be litigated.
- General Counsel
- The chief legal officer of a corporation or other business entity, responsible for managing the entity's legal affairs and serving as the senior legal advisor to....