A Granbury business attorney with boardroom mileage.
Kraus Law practices corporate and business law from Granbury, the Hood County seat, home base, not a satellite office. Twenty-five years of corporate work, three tours as a public company General Counsel, and a national firm behind it, available where the county actually does business.
One district court, and what that means
Hood County has a single district court. The 355th Judicial District is composed of Hood County and nothing else, which means one bench hears every civil matter here above the county court at law's ceiling. The county court at law handles civil disputes up to $250,000. Above that figure, in this county, there is one courtroom.
For most of Granbury's history that was the whole map. Since September 1, 2024 there has been a second door. If a dispute clears five million dollars and fits one of the enumerated categories, it can be heard in the Texas Business Court, and Hood County sits inside the Eighth Division along with seventeen other North Texas counties. That court keeps chambers in Fort Worth, about forty miles up the highway.
The route runs both directions, and one of the cases that proves it started here. In G-Force & Associates v. Bloecher, 2025 Tex. Bus. 18, a defendant removed a Hood County case to the Business Court on the theory that a set of construction bids added up to a qualified transaction. Judge Bullard held that a bid is not a consummated agreement and sent the case back to the 355th District Court. Knowing which of those two courtrooms a dispute belongs in, before anyone files, is worth more than most of what happens afterward.
What the county's businesses actually look like
Hood County had 1,552 business establishments with employees at the last count, and 7,103 without. Better than four to one. That ratio describes the place more honestly than any chamber brochure: this is an economy of owner-operated businesses, most of them small enough that the owner is also the finance department and the HR department.
The county has grown to roughly 70,500 residents, up about 14.5 percent since 2020 against a statewide rate closer to nine. Faster than Texas, which is saying something, though not among the state's fastest counties and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The number that matters most for the work I do is a different one. More than a quarter of Hood County residents are sixty-five or older, roughly 27.6 percent against about eighteen nationally. A county with that age profile and that many owner-operated businesses is a county with a lot of transitions coming, and most of them will be handled by a document written years earlier or by no document at all. Which one it is tends to decide how the transition goes.
The work that comes out of that
Succession and exit. The buy-sell agreement that actually fires when someone dies, divorces, retires or simply wants out. Most of the ones I read were written for a company that no longer exists at a valuation nobody would accept now. Sorting that out while everyone is still getting along costs a fraction of sorting it out afterward, and the valuation question is usually where it starts. Selling the company. The owner's side of a sale, from getting the house in order through the letter of intent, diligence and the purchase agreement. The price is agreed at the letter of intent. Everything after it is about keeping that price. The lawyer you do not have. Fractional general counsel, for a company with contracts cycling monthly and governance decisions accumulating and nobody whose job it is to see them coming. Partner disputes. When it has already gone wrong, what you can do depends almost entirely on the company agreement, and after Ritchie v. Rupe a Texas minority owner's protection is largely whatever was negotiated at the front end. That is covered under shareholder disputes.What I do not do, and who I hand it to
Real estate, employment matters and trademark registration go to colleagues at Scale LLP rather than to me. That is not modesty, it is arithmetic: a lawyer who claims everything is telling you he has never had to specialise. I am a corporate and transactional lawyer with three tours as a general counsel of public companies behind me, and the referral is usually to someone in the same firm on the same email.
It also means I will tell you when a matter does not need a lawyer at my rate, which happens more often than the billing model would prefer.
On the square
The office is at 205 East Bridge Street, on the north edge of the Hood County Courthouse Historic District. The courthouse itself went up in 1890 and 1891, limestone out of the Brazos, a W. C. Dodson design with a clock tower, and the square around it has been on the National Register since 1974. The nomination called it one of the most complete nineteenth-century courthouse squares in Texas.
None of that has anything to do with the quality of legal work. It has a good deal to do with why the practice is here. Fort Worth is forty minutes when a courtroom requires it and Dallas is ninety, and the rest of the time this is a better place to think than a tower is.
Common questions
Yes, and with a background that usually requires a drive: I practice corporate law from Granbury after 25 years of it elsewhere, including three tours as a public company General Counsel and dual U.S.-Canada licensing. Kraus Law is based here, on purpose. Hood County businesses get the kind of counsel that normally sits in a downtown Fort Worth or Dallas tower, without the tower.
The life of a company, end to end: entity formation and the company agreements that prevent later fights, contracts and the disputes they sometimes become, employment questions as you grow, and the owner transactions, buying, selling, bringing in a partner, that Hood County's business generation is increasingly facing. When a matter needs a specialist, trademark litigation, a trial team, a tax structure, it moves to my colleagues at Scale LLP, a national firm across 22 states, and you never start over with a new firm.
You can, and for some matters you should, which is exactly what the Scale relationship is for. What a local practice changes is the everyday layer: contracts read this week, the employment question answered before the termination meeting, the deal begun over coffee on the square rather than scheduled three weeks out. Legal counsel works better as a relationship than as an errand, and relationships are local.
The pattern locally: formation and company agreements for new ventures; contract and lease work for the trades, medical practices, and lake-economy businesses that anchor the county; succession and sale planning for owners a decade into a business that has quietly become valuable; and increasingly, fractional general counsel arrangements for companies that outgrew their formation attorney but don't need a full-time hire.
The 355th District Court, which is composed of Hood County alone, for a civil dispute above $250,000. Below that figure, the Hood County Court at Law. If the amount in controversy exceeds five million dollars and the claim fits one of the categories in Chapter 25A, it may instead be heard in the Texas Business Court's Eighth Division, which keeps chambers in Fort Worth.
The question is usually the reverse. Hood County has more than 8,600 business establishments and an unusually high share of owners at or near retirement age. The transactions are here. What has generally not been here is counsel who has sat in the general counsel chair of a public company, which is the gap this practice exists to close.
No. That is most of the point. The office is on the Granbury square, and for the work I do the location of the lawyer matters far less than whether the lawyer has done the thing before.
Boardroom counsel, courthouse-square distance.
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.
- Company Agreement
- The principal governance document of a Texas LLC, the contract among members (and managers, if applicable) that establishes the LLC's internal rules.
- Buy-Sell Agreement
- A contract among owners of a closely-held business establishing terms for transfer of ownership interests upon specified triggering events, death, disability, retirement, termination of employment, divorce....
- 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....
- Forum Selection Clause
- A forum selection clause fixes in advance where disputes will be litigated.