Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing, the trial boutique that has operated in Houston for more than 32 years, will open its first satellite office on Jan. 1.
This week, John Zavitsanos signed the lease agreement for office space inside the Trammell Crow Center in downtown Dallas. The firm currently employs 64 attorneys in Houston and will launch the Dallas office with two partners and an associate, with plans to have as many as 10 lawyers working there by the end of 2026.
“When we first moved into this building in Houston there were three of us at the time, and we had a very small amount of space in 1993,” Zavitsanos said in an exclusive interview with The Texas Lawbook. “I was getting some déjà vu walking around the space in Dallas. It just felt like, wow, we’re in effect kind of starting over. But we’re going to have a lot more foundational resources than when we started here.”
Warren McCarty, who launched his own firm in June after spending the prior 11 years with Caldwell Cassady & Curry, will serve as the managing partner of the new office. Kyle A. Poelker will be the head of commercial litigation in the Dallas office and a Dallas-based associate who was recently hired by the firm will also be there.
In an interview with The Lawbook Wednesday, McCarty said he was ready to branch out on his own after spending his entire legal career working alongside and learning from his mentor, Brad Caldwell, but a recent trial victory, where he teamed up with AZA, changed his mind about building his solo career.
“In that trial, we dominated,” he said. “Through that process, I learned a lot about AZA and it’s a true trial firm and the attorneys and staff are immensely talented, world-class trial attorneys.”
“But more than anything, I found it was a place built on professionalism, and trust and loyalty, which can be hard to find these days. It was immediately attractive to me.”
McCarty is a graduate of Illinois State University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He went to law school with Jason McManis, who leads AZA’s intellectual property group.
In September, McManis and McCarty worked together in a patent infringement jury trial that netted a $78.5 million verdict for their client. After that win, McCarty said AZA approached him about becoming the managing partner who would launch its Dallas office.
“I had so much fun winning together that it was intoxicating, I wanted to keep it going, and I believe AZA is a sleeping giant as it relates particularly to intellectual property cases,” McCarty said. “They have a world-class commercial practice and Jason McManis has done an excellent job growing the IP group, and it’s primed to be a rocket ship. There are no ceilings.”
Zavitsanos said the volume of intellectual property work the firm is handling drove the decision to open an office in Dallas.
“At least for patent cases, there’s more going on in Dallas than there is in Houston… it made sense to have a Dallas office because our IP practice is blowing up,” he said.
While the firm doesn’t usually lateral in partners, Zavitsanos said McCarty is an exception.
“He very much fits our culture and that really is the main driver: whether they have AZA DNA in them,” he said. “And Warren definitely does.”
In March 2022, two of AZA’s name partners who focused on IP matters, Demetrios Anaipakos and Amir Alavi, left the firm and launched their own boutique. Seven other AZA lawyers followed them, which Zavitsanos said “decimated” the firm’s IP practice group.
“The very best people were the ones that were left,” Zavitsanos said of the split. “And we know that because we’re having much more success now than we ever did with them when they were here. It has taken us three years to build that practice back up, numbers wise, to where it was before.”
He said the firm was gradual and intentional about rebuilding that practice group and, along the way, “picked up a ton of blue-chip clients” active in IP litigation.
In particular, Zavitsanos said the firm has become a “very shiny object” to litigation funders entering the IP space who are looking for firms to take cases to trial and win big. Those funders, he said, are controlling a “substantial amount” of patent litigation.
“The thing with these funders, which are kind of like private equity, they want as close to a guaranteed result as possible, and the way you’re going to get as close to a guaranteed result as possible is you hire a firm that knows how to try a case,” he said. “Frankly, there just aren’t a lot of firms that go to trial as much as we do… our relationship with these funders has just exploded over the last year.”
Waiting more than 30 years to launch a second office was due, in part, to Zavitsanos’ own reluctance. He explained when the firm first started, the partners agreed that in order to keep the culture intact, it was important to have everyone working on one floor together.
The firm now occupies three floors in the Houston Center building downtown.
“And then we said, ‘No way, no how we’ll never open a branch office,’ because, again, you lose that connection, and people need to be around each other every day to keep what makes us so unique,” he said. “But frankly, as we got to work with Warren, and got to know him better, he really is an extension of us, and I feel very comfortable that he and Kyle will help establish and build in Dallas what we have here in Houston.”