Attorneys John Raley and Kelly Raley met at the University of Oklahoma where John, a former OU varsity football player, was studying law and Kelly had just been crowned OU’s Homecoming Queen and named Outstanding Senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.  After Kelly’s first year at OU medical school, they married and moved to Scotland where John was a Rotary Scholar. At the University of Aberdeen, John received an LL.M. in International Law and Kelly attended medical school courses. 

Returning from Scotland, John began his legal career in Houston at Fulbright & Jaworski and Kelly returned to OU medical school. Missing John, Kelly eventually moved to Houston and changed her career path to law.  As a graduate of the University of Houston Law Center, she joined the firm of Vinson & Elkins. The unexpected stillborn death of their first baby prompted Kelly later to leave her law practice until their subsequent children were in elementary school.

In 2001, John resigned his partnership at Fulbright & Jaworski to open and manage the Houston office of a Dallas-based civil litigation/medical malpractice firm. John opened a commercial litigation law firm in 2010.  Kelly assisted John and his partners to get both firms set up, open and successfully operating.

Over the past two decades, John and Kelly have worked together on a variety of civil lawsuits. They co-authored a winning brief before the U.S. Supreme Court. They collaborated on a landmark pro bono murder exoneration case that is the subject of two documentaries and changed Texas law. 

For a time, Kelly was in-house counsel and then Executive Director for a national nonprofit organization for wounded veterans while John was trying complex commercial lawsuits. More recently, Kelly obtained her LL.M. in Health Law at the University of Houston in 2021 - the same year that all three of John and Kelly’s children had weddings. In February 2023 John and Kelly opened their own law firm and look forward to many years of full-time practice together. 

As law partners, John and Kelly are dedicated to serving their clients thoroughly, ethically, and professionally. Their law office/mediation suite is designed to warmly welcome and accommodate not only their litigation clients, but also mediating parties who depend on John to help them effectively resolve disputes with his credentialed mediation skills.