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Dunham & Jones: The Austin Firm That Grew From One Lawyer in 1989 to 125+ Attorneys Statewide

Paul Dunham opened a single criminal-defense office on Guadalupe Street in 1989. Thirty-six years later, that same Austin headquarters anchors a firm with more than 125 attorneys and 18 offices across Texas — making it one of the largest single-focus criminal defense operations in the state. This Austin criminal defense attorney firm remains headquartered exactly where it started.

At a Glance: Austin Criminal Defense Attorney Firm Overview

Origin & Background

Paul J. Dunham founded the firm in Austin in 1989. In 1997 he expanded into Fort Worth and Dallas, and the firm has since grown into a statewide criminal defense practice with offices spanning Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, and more than a dozen other Texas cities, plus a Nashville office. Managing partner Scotty Jones joined Dunham in building out the firm’s current model, which the firm describes as deliberately hiring board-certified attorneys and former prosecutors into a large, standardized defense practice rather than growing around a single named partner’s individual docket.

Practice Concentration: Austin Criminal Defense Attorney Focus

The firm’s criminal division represents clients on DWI, assault (including family violence), drug possession, theft, and most other Texas misdemeanor and felony charges. Several of its attorneys, including Robert L. Buford III and Ben Florey, are individually Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization — a credential distinct from the firm’s own marketing, since certification attaches to the individual attorney, not the firm as a whole. Buford has more than 50 jury trials to verdict; Florey has over four decades of criminal defense experience.

Notable Work

The firm reports over 200 years of combined attorney experience firm-wide but does not publish a structured, case-by-case verdicts-and-outcomes table for its Austin office specifically. Independent client reviews describe individual case outcomes including full dismissals of aggravated assault charges and a case reduced from felony charges to a small fine with no jail time. Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case, and dismissal and reduction outcomes described by individual reviewers are self-reported by those clients, not independently verified court records.

Client Voice

Dunham & Jones holds a 4.5-star aggregated rating across 491 reviews on Birdeye and an AV Preeminent Martindale-Hubbell rating at the firm level. Client reviews frequently praise individual named attorneys — Clayton Littlefield, J.D. Schmidt, Ryan Church, and Kaleb Moore among them — for full case dismissals and responsive communication; one reviewer wrote of a full dismissal on aggravated assault charges, “cant say enough.” Set against that volume of positive reviews, the Better Business Bureau lists the firm’s Austin BBB profile as reflecting a failure to respond to three complaints filed against the business — a genuine, disclosable gap in an otherwise strong review record, and one prospective clients should ask about directly given the firm’s size and multi-office structure.

Beyond the Courtroom

The firm has received the National Trial Lawyers Top 100 Trial Lawyers recognition for Paul Dunham, along with firm-level awards including “Best Attorneys of America” (2018–2019) and NACDA and Veteran Approved recognitions. Attorney-side Glassdoor reviews rate the firm highly as an employer (4.7 out of 5 for attorneys specifically), which is a workplace-quality signal rather than a client-outcome one, but is included here because a firm’s ability to retain trial-experienced attorneys at scale bears on client representation quality over time.

Recognition

Robert L. Buford III and Ben Florey are individually Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization — the only attorneys at this firm presented as “specialists” in this profile, and only because that certification was independently confirmed through the firm’s own attorney biographies describing state board certification specifically. The firm carries an AV Preeminent Martindale-Hubbell rating and Paul Dunham has been named to the National Trial Lawyers Top 100. These are peer-review, state-board, and publication-based recognitions rather than blanket firm self-description; not every attorney at a 125-lawyer firm holds the same individual credentials, and this profile does not claim otherwise.

Texas Legal Backdrop

Texas DWI is governed by Texas Penal Code Chapter 49; a first-offense DWI is a Class B misdemeanor, but the charge escalates with a prior conviction, an open-container violation, or a blood alcohol concentration of 0.15 or above (Class A misdemeanor), and further escalates to a felony with a third conviction or if a child under 15 was in the vehicle. Texas Transportation Code § 724.011 establishes “implied consent” — that a driver arrested for DWI is deemed to have consented to a breath or blood test, though a driver can still refuse and face separate administrative license suspension consequences under the state’s Administrative License Revocation (ALR) process, which runs on a short, independent timeline from the criminal case itself. This is general background information, not legal advice, and does not account for the specific facts of any case.

Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Growing from a single Austin office in 1989 to a 125-plus-attorney statewide practice without losing its original headquarters address is a genuinely unusual growth story for a criminal defense firm, and the presence of individually board-certified attorneys on staff — not just firm-level marketing claims — gives the credential claims here real weight. A 4.5-star rating across nearly 500 reviews at this scale is also a meaningfully larger sample than most boutique firms in this directory can offer.

The honest trade-off is the one that comes with any large, multi-office defense firm: a client is being matched to whichever attorney the firm assigns from its roster, not necessarily to a specific named partner they researched in advance, and the BBB’s unresolved-complaints notation — three complaints the firm did not respond to — is worth asking about directly given the firm’s size and volume of intake. A large firm’s board-certified attorneys and strong average review score don’t guarantee every case gets senior-attorney attention; that’s a fair question to ask in an initial consultation rather than assume either way.

Methodology & Sourcing

This profile was compiled from Dunham & Jones’s own website (dunhamlaw.com), including its attorney biography pages and media kit, the firm’s Birdeye review aggregation (491 reviews), Better Business Bureau business profile (including its complaint-response notation), Glassdoor’s attorney-specific employee reviews, Yelp listings for the Austin and other Texas offices, and Lawyers.com’s Martindale-Hubbell-sourced peer rating page.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys is an independently researched legal directory. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by Dunham & Jones prior to publication. Awesome Attorneys may in the future offer sponsored placement products to firms profiled on this site, but sponsorship status has no bearing on editorial content, and inclusion in this directory is not an endorsement of any firm for any particular legal matter. Nothing in this profile constitutes legal advice or a lawyer referral; readers with a legal question should consult a licensed Texas attorney directly.