A practice named after two grandparents.
Hartwell was a West Texas lawyer and rancher who drafted his neighbors’ wills at a kitchen table in the forties. Reese was my mother. Both names appear here because the practice owes its existence to both lineages.
Ellery Hartwell Reese
Principal Attorney
- Licensed
- Texas
- Education
- J.D., The University of Texas School of Law
LL.M. in Taxation, University of Florida - Memberships
- State Bar of Texas, Real Estate, Probate and Trust Law Section
- Founded
- 2023, Austin, Texas
I spent twelve years at a larger firm — first in Houston, then in Austin — practicing estate and tax law in the departments that serve operating-company founders, real-estate holders, and second-generation family wealth. It was a serious education. It was also, over time, an education in what a large firm’s incentives do to the kind of work a family needs.
A family estate is not a transaction. It has a tempo that does not match a billable-hour pipeline. The plans I watched fail, when they failed, did not fail at the drafting table. They failed in the years between — when the funding never got done, when the trustee named in 2011 moved out of state, when the operating agreement got amended and the trust never caught up. The practice needed someone who was still there in year six.
I started Hartwell & Reese in 2023 to be that attorney. The firm is one person. It stays one person. Client intake is capped at a number I can hold carefully, and the retainer structure is built around the assumption that each family is a ten-year relationship.
I am licensed in Texas. The firm practices only Texas law — we refer out-of-jurisdiction work to counsel who actually live in the relevant states. My JD is from The University of Texas School of Law and my LLM in Taxation is from the University of Florida. I am an active member of the Real Estate, Probate and Trust Law Section of the State Bar of Texas.
Families that have already built something.
Our core engagement is a Texas family — typically in their late forties through their seventies — that owns a combination of the following: real property they intend to keep in the family, an operating business or meaningful interest in one, retirement accounts above the federal estate-tax exemption when taken together with the rest, and a household view that wealth is to be transferred with intention rather than spent down.
Families whose circumstances are below that threshold are better served by a general-practice firm or a DIY platform, and we will say so on the initial call. We are not the cheapest plan. For the family we serve, we are the plan that does not fail in year six.
Out of scope, explicitly.
The firm does not practice family law, personal injury, criminal defense, real-estate transactional work, or general business litigation. When prospective clients ask, we refer — we keep a short list of Austin attorneys whose work we trust in each of those areas.