Attorneys W. Kelly Puls, Mark A. Haney and Stephanie E. Kaiser have joined together to open a new firm, Puls Haney Kaiser PLLC.
The firm has 19 practice groups offering services ranging from business and personal injury litigation to banking and transactional work.
The partners also have opened an office in Austin.
“Our clients’ experiences and concerns become ours. We engage fully and are there to help our clients when bad things happen to good people,” said Haney.
Haney has represented clients in litigation matters throughout Texas, including wrongful death, personal injury, fraud, breach of contract, and patent and trademark infringement. He has handled complex business matters, such as overseeing multistate litigation and investigation of a public utility, licensed phone companies as public utilities, drafted tariffs throughout the United States, and negotiated public rights of way. On two occasions, he obtained verdicts that qualified as one of the Top 100 verdicts in the U.S. for that year.
Haney is a past president and board member of the Tarrant County Trial Lawyers Association and a member of the Fort Worth Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1983 and his J.D. from the University of Tulsa College of Law in 1987.
Puls is board certified in personal injury and in civil trial law. He has tried hundreds of cases to verdict, lectured extensively on voir dire examinations, and served as a witness on matters involving attorneys’ fees and legal ethics. He has been involved in many complex civil and commercial cases, including lead local counsel in the Exxon XTO merger, the largest merger in the United States at the time, and has worked on numerous complex, multi-state transactions. One of only three attorneys nationwide to try a class action case to verdict, Puls was also involved in one of the largest anti-trust cases in Texas, resulting in a verdict with findings of price fixing in the food industry. He also obtained one of the largest verdicts in Texas for defamation involving the Pierce Marshall/Anna Nicole Smith litigation.
Puls earned his bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University in 1982 and his J.D. degree from California Western School of Law in 1986.
Kaiser most recently served as the general counsel and chief legal officer of a lending institution and was previously a partner with the law firms of Kelly Hart & Hallman LLP and McGinnis, Lochridge & Kilgore LLP. She has extensive experience in representing clients in litigation, bankruptcy, banking and finance, regulatory, farming and ranching, and administrative law matters. She is immediate past president and barrister member of the Robert W. Calvert American Inn of Court and is a fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation. Kaiser is a summa cum laude 1996 graduate of TCU and received her J.D. from the University of Texas Law School in 1999.