Professional Licensure & Defense

We Help Design Professionals:

• Allocate risk up front through skillful contract drafting and negotiation.
• Avoid and manage disputes by working through issues as they arise.
• Defend their work against claims that emerge over their professional design.
• Advocate to protect their reputation and continued licensure in the face of professional grievances with the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners and Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors.

Design is in our DNA

Although our firm counsels clients in every corner of the construction industry, our deepest roots lie in representing design professionals. Our founder, William Allensworth, defended and championed the rights of architects and engineers long before he started his own practice, and they became his signature clients when our firm was founded. As a result, we have the broad industry knowledge, experience, and strategic perspective needed to assess and repel attacks on design professionals accused of poor design, deficient construction phase work, or improper or unethical professional conduct. We understand the specific issues facing design professionals because we’ve spent decades working closely with them, both directly as legal counsel to specific clients and in leadership and advisory roles in industry associations like AIA Austin and the Texas Society of Architects.

As construction attorneys, we work at an exceptionally high level of scholarship and knowledge. Despite its compact size, our firm’s thought leaders have produced an enormous footprint of literature, speeches, and instruction on essential and developing industry topics for architects, engineers, landscape architects, interior designers, and surveyors. This produces an extraordinary command of the details and issues driving our cases. We’re used to being the most prepared advocates in the room, enabling us to take control of the claims and settlement dialogue, in turn giving us a central, and often determinative, impact on the discussion.

For architects and engineers, a professional grievance and licensing agency investigation can represent the darkest moment of their careers. We help them find a path to daylight.

Strategic Execution

Allensworth’s Professional Licensure & Defense practice helps protect the most important things to design professionals in the construction industry: their reputation and their professional livelihood. As law practitioners who hold professional registrations of our own, we understand the gravity of a professional licensure hearing, and we know there’s no room for missteps. Our long history as trusted licensure defense attorneys for architects and engineers, plus our location in the capital city of Austin—the hub of Texas administrative law—give our work for design professionals the strongest possible foundation. We’re particularly effective and highly strategic in defending design professionals facing licensure threats. For each dispute, we seek out a client-specific and situation-specific “path to daylight”—a definitive end to the dispute, and a resumption of their daily professional practice. Ideally, we do this by working with agency enforcement staff to see our point of view and to resolve the case collaboratively whenever possible.

Our baseline approach always seeks a cost-effective and reasonable exit from a dispute—but if the proceedings become truly adversarial, we’re prepared to advocate aggressively for our clients. We have engaged in administrative disputes with both the TBAE and TBPELS all the way through to a proposal for decision from an Administrative Law Judge at the State Office of Administrative Hearings—and on back through appeals with each agency and in state district court. No matter the venue, our license defense attorneys’ goal is to help our design clients protect their licensure and reputation and allow them to get back to what they signed up for: the practice of architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, interior design, and surveying.