Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing made a quiet announcement in December 2025 that carried real weight in the Texas legal market. After operating for more than three decades out of a single Houston address, AZA signed a lease for office space in the Trammell Crow Center in downtown Dallas and set a January 2026 opening date. The firm had 64 attorneys at the time, all of them working from One Houston Center on McKinney Street.
For a litigation boutique that had deliberately avoided branching out for 32 years, the move signals something beyond square footage. AZA Law had built its entire identity around a centralized Houston trial practice. Every one of its more than 250 completed trials had been staffed from that single office. Every Litigation Department of the Year award from Texas Lawyer, every Chambers USA ranking, every BTI Consulting “Awesome Opponents” designation came out of a firm that worked in one city from one suite. Opening a second office meant rethinking part of that identity.
Patent Filings Pulled AZA Law Toward Dallas
Zavitsanos was candid about what tipped the balance. “At least for patent cases, there’s more going on in Dallas than there is in Houston,” he told The Texas Lawbook. “It made sense to have a Dallas office because our IP practice is blowing up.”
Filing data supports that read. The Eastern District of Texas, which includes courthouses in Marshall, Tyler, and Plano, reclaimed its position as the country’s busiest federal patent venue in early 2025. RPX Corp. reported that the Eastern District led all U.S. districts for overall patent litigation in the first quarter of that year, after a period of decline following the Supreme Court’s 2017 ruling in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC. A 2025 IAM report found that patent filings across all federal district courts rose 19% year over year, with Texas districts accounting for a significant portion of that increase. Putting attorneys in Dallas shortens the distance between AZA Law and the East Texas courtrooms where much of that work is heard.
A $78.5 Million Samsung Verdict and the New Managing Partner
AZAs IP group had just produced a result that underscored the Dallas connection. Jason McManis, who leads the firm’s intellectual property practice, teamed with incoming managing partner Warren McCarty for a September 2025 patent infringement jury trial in the Eastern District. Jurors awarded their client, Anonymous Media Research Holdings, the full $78,512,999 it requested from Samsung Electronics.
McCarty, who had spent more than a decade at Dallas-based Caldwell Cassady & Curry before launching his own practice earlier in 2025, said the experience shaped his decision to come to AZA Law.
“In that trial, we dominated. 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,” McCarty told The Texas Lawbook. Kyle Poelker, an existing AZA partner, would relocate from Houston to head commercial litigation in Dallas.
Starting Over With Three Decades of Resources
AZA planned to open with two partners and two associates, aiming for 10 attorneys within the first year.
Zavitsanos described touring the space to The Texas Lawbook: “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. 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.”
He acknowledged that rebuilding the IP bench took time. Two name partners focused on intellectual property left AZA in March 2022 to start their own boutique, and several attorneys followed. “It has taken us three years to build that practice back up, numbers wise, to where it was before,” he said.
McCarty framed his own decision differently: “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.”
AZA’s move did not happen in isolation. Bloomberg Law referenced the opening in a February 2026 story about Latham & Watkins’ own plans for a Dallas office, noting AZA had recently established a smaller location focused on IP and patent work. Established firms like McGuireWoods and Paul Hastings already operate there. Among the firm’s early work from the Dallas base, AZA tried its first case in the newly created Texas Business Courts in early 2026, securing a defense verdict for an energy sector client on $26.5 million in natural gas claims tied to Winter Storm Uri.
Related: John Zavitsanos Named One of Top Law Firm Managing Partners in the Nation
