Amaro Law Firm

Bios

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  R. James Amaro

  Founder

  R. James Amaro founded the Amaro Law Firm in 2005 after leaving his position as an attorney at a defense law firm. Not long after founding the firm, Mr. Amaro was hired to represent many individuals and families who had their lives destroyed by the BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas. Since then, Mr. Amaro has successfully represented thousands of people and businesses in various legal matters, including personal injury claims, business disputes, insurance claims, hurricane claims, and commercial litigation. Mr. Amaro tried one of the first lawsuits related to Hurricane Ike and took many more to the eve of trial for many business and home owner clients. More recently, the Amaro Law Firm has been active in assisting thousands of cleanup workers and businesses which suffered injuries and losses due to the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill. Every year since being founded, the Amaro Law Firm has represented clients in legal matters and obtained just compensation for its clients who have been personally injured or suffered damages in business and insurance disputes. Mr. Amaro has instilled his firm and staff with his relentless tenacity to effectively represent the firm’s clients with the utmost duty of candor and loyalty. Prior to founding the firm, Mr. Amaro gained a wide breadth and invaluable work experience working at some of the largest national and state based law firms in Wisconsin and Texas. In his career, Mr. Amaro has written federal opinions for a federal judge and worked for many large defense law firms. In law school, Mr. Amaro served as a managing editor of the Wisconsin International Law Journal and his article was one of few selected for publication in that journal. His experiences have given him the perspective to manage his firm’s cases efficiently and effectively. In the beginning of his legal career, Mr. Amaro was an aggressive defense attorney with a Houston insurance defense firm where he learned how the “insurance racket” works. As a defense attorney, Mr. Amaro practiced in the areas of insurance coverage and defended clients in the areas of construction law, real estate law, toxic torts, products liability, commercial litigation and arbitration, personal injury and wrongful death. In college, Mr. Amaro worked and studied in real estate, engineering, and internet technology as a student and as an entrepreneur during and after his college studies. To self-finance his education, he had obtained multiple academic scholarships to several top-tier universities across the United States and was heavily recruited by many Ivy league schools due to his competitive college entrance exam scores and his ranking number 4 in his senior class of nearly 400. Despite the offers, Mr. Amaro decided to stay in Texas and attend the University of Texas at Austin to study chemical engineering in its reputable program. In his chemical engineering studies, Mr. Amaro excelled and obtained an internship with a large engineering company in Houston called Bechtel Corporation at which he reviewed process flow diagrams and wrote a visual basic program for engineers to use to perform calculus and differential equations. He was in the advanced sequence of his studies in the middle of his junior year before he decided to change his major to economics and pursue a career in law. Before finishing his studies in economics at the University of Texas, Mr. Amaro co-founded a popular internet based business in Austin which provided marketing and social services to students and to companies marketing to students. The company exploded in popularity and was advertised on the radio within 3 months of launching and became one of the most visited websites in Austin by university students. Also while in Austin and only at the age of 20, Mr. Amaro obtained his real estate license and began selling and leasing real estate all over the Austin area. Today, Mr. Amaro still owns interests and invests in real estate and internet technology companies. Through his experience, Mr. Amaro has learned how the judicial system perceives insurance and personal injury claims and the common strategies of insurance defense law firms and the insurance companies that pay them. Through his business and entrepreneur experiences, he understands what makes businesses successful and how to protect valuable business interests. Mr. Amaro comes from a large family from Sugar Land, Texas. His paternal grandmother came from a Sioux Indian reservation in North Dakota after meeting his grandfather who served in the Air Force in WWII with his brothers. Other parts of his family sought refuge from the violent Mexican Revolution which occurred in the early 1900s. They all settled in Sugar Land eventually and many of his family members worked hard and tirelessly at the Imperial Sugar Refinery for decades to support their families while living in housing subsidized by the refinery.

  Education:

  Link: R. James Amaro

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  David Miller

  Managing Attorney

  David Miller is originally from Monroe, Louisiana, and he moved to Alabama to earn his undergraduate degree from Birmingham-Southern College where he majored in English. During his studies in Alabama, he was President of the Beta Xi Chapter of Theta Chi Fraternity. David also participated in a summer exchange program studying Humanities at St.John’s College in Oxford, England.After graduating Magna Cum Laude from the university, David enrolled in the University of Alabama School of Law. As a law student, he was a Junior Editor for the Journal of Legal Profession and spent a semester working in the Elder Law Clinic, a program designed to provide pro bono legal services to members of the community over sixty years of age who could not afford legal representation on their own. David also spent a summer term in Switzerland at the Fribourg University Law School studying International Banking and Comparative Law.After law school, David began working for the Houston-based law firm Arguello, Hope & Associates, PLLC, in the Birmingham, Alabama office where he assisted clients in handling their property insurance claims arising from a devastating tornado that struck Tuscaloosa and Birmingham in April of 2011. This was the largest tornado outbreak in U.S. history during which over 350 tornadoes formed in a few short days. In the summer of 2013, he moved to Houston, Texas and joined the Amaro Law Firm to assist in handling a joint-venture docket of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill claims with Arguello, Hope & Associates and the Amaro Law Firm. In his spare time, David enjoys playing tennis, watching college football, and exploring his new home, the city of Houston.

  Education:

  Link: David Miller

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  Kara L. Kellogg

  Associate

  Kara L. Kellogg is a trial lawyer who currently represents plaintiffs involved in Civil Litigation. As a plaintiffs’ attorney, she has handled a wide variety of civil litigation lawsuits. While working at a nationally recognized plaintiffs’ firm, she handled over 15,000 Transvaginal Mesh cases by playing a pivotal role in the review, evaluation and management of medical records. Prior to this, Kara settled over $40 million dollars in lawsuits for approximately 500 plaintiffs involved in first party bad faith insurance disputes as a result of suffering damages due to Hurricane Ike. Other types of cases she has handled, include, but are not limited to, pharmaceutical lawsuits, personal injury, construction and commercial litigation. Additionally, Kara has the unique advantage to have worked for a nationwide Civil Defense firm where she gained valuable insight regarding the practices of insurance companies while representing many major insurance companies as a litigator and as an insurance coverage attorney. Kara is licensed to practice law in the State of Texas. Kara is a native Houstonian and sixth generation Texan. After graduating from Alief Elsik High School, Kara earned a B.A. in English from Texas A&M University in Kingsville, where she participated in a wide-variety of academic, athletic and social organizations and earned several awards, honors and the induction into honor societies. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Kara earned her M.A. in Philosophy from Texas A&M University in College Station. She was then chosen for a teaching fellowship with the prestigious Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). She lived and taught Philosophy and English in Mexico for two years. She returned to the United States to attend

  Education:

  Link: Kara L. Kellogg

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  Ashlee Dunham

  Associate

  Ashlee E. Dunham graduated from the University of North Texas (UNT) in December of 2003 with a B.A. in Philosophy. Having a passion for the protection of the environment, she pursued additional graduate work in Environmental Ethics from 2004-2006 at UNT, one of the nation’s top ten schools in the field. Ms. Dunham had always considered law school as a future path, even as a young student at UNT. In 2009, she was ready to pursue that path and began studying for her Juris Doctorate at South Texas College of Law in August of 2010. While in law school, Ms. Dunham was an active member of the Environmental Law Society, held the position of President of AMICUS Law Society for two years, twice earned the Amicus Achievement Grant, completed 155.5 hours in the Pro Bono Honors Program, and completed internships at the Texas Attorney General’s Office, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, the Office of the Houston City Attorney, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and two personal injury firms. She graduated from South Texas College of Law in May of 2013, was awarded the Emerging Leader Award by Stonewall Law Association of Greater Houston (SLAGH), was elected At-Large Director for SLAGH, took the bar exam, and became a licensed attorney in the State of Texas on November 1, 2013. Ms. Dunham solidified her experience in personal injury both during and following law school while interning for Nielsen & Mukerji and The Merman Law Firm. She was hired as an associate attorney by The Merman Law Firm following her bar passage and continued to develop in the areas of personal injury, civil rights, and mass torts. Ms. Dunham began working for Barton Law Firm and The Luke Law Firm as an associate attorney to both firms in April of 2014, where she managed both pre-litigation and litigation dockets, handling civil rights cases involving excessive use of force by police officers, first-party bad faith insurance claims, mass torts, and personal injury matters involving bad pharmaceuticals, product defects, commercial motor vehicle collisions, toxic plant releases, premises liability, dog bite injuries, food poisoning, and catastrophic work injuries. Ms. Dunham is a passionate, diligent, hard-working attorney with an inherent sense of justice and a mind for utilizing procedure to build a winning case. She joined the Amaro Law Firm in October of 2016. In her spare time, she enjoys volunteering, surfing, kickboxing, and playing billiards competitively.

  Education:

  Link: Ashlee Dunham

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  G. Daniel Garcia Carranco

  Associate

  G. Daniel Garcia Carranco was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1976. Mr. Garcia Carranco had a Catholic upbringing and he spent most of his childhood in Mexico City up until he turned 14 years old, when his father decided to enroll him at a Military School called Missouri Military Academy which is about 110 miles northwest of St. Louis, MO. Mr. Garcia Carranco spent the next five years of his life at this military school learning the values that he lives by today: Discipline, Ethic, Integrity, Honesty, Respect, Compassion and Determination. Mr. Garcia Carranco is a Mexican Licensed Attorney with an LL.M in International Law from the University of Houston Law Center, a Master’s Degree in corporate law from the Universidad Anahuac del Norte, and more than 15 years of combined business and litigation experience. During this period, he represented major companies both as an in-house lawyer and as a lawyer and legal assistant in private practice. Before joining Amaro Law Firm, he was the Head of the Legal Department for the Mexican subsidiary of a UK-based international financial services company, where he was in charge of supervising a legal team comprised of 35 attorneys, including two Legal Managers, specialized in numerous legal matters, including but not limited to civil & commercial litigation, labor disputes, administrative proceedings, corporate law, regulatory compliance, transactional law, IP, and foreign investment matters, among others. His prior experience includes more than 7.5 years as in-house counsel for PEMEX, the Mexican-owned Oil and Gas Company and its subsidiaries. During his tenure in PEMEX, he was the first-chair attorney in the North Gulf Region Part of Mexico (South of the State of Tamaulipas, North of the State of Veracruz and the Northeast Part of the State of San Luis Potosi) regarding all civil, commercial, agrarian, administrative and environmental trials and administrative proceedings to which PEMEX and/or its Subsidiary Companies were part of, either as Plaintiffs or Defendants. During the time Mr. Garcia Carranco worked for PEMEX (2006-2013), he achieved a 100% success rate in all trial and administrative hearings, either in first instance or on appeal. As a result of Mr. Garcia Carranco’s efforts, he was able to help preserve the integrity of the Mexican Oil Production Activities in Tamaulipas, Veracruz and San Luis Potosi. Mr. Garcia Carranco’s outstanding performance was recognized by an award of a PEMEX Scholarship for LL.M. studies at the University of Houston Law Center, from August 2011 – May 2012. Mr. Garcia Carranco joined the Amaro Law Firm in early 2016 to assist with the firm’s growing Spanish speaking clientele in Texas and across the nation while awaits his opportunity to sit for the Texas bar. During his free time, Mr. Garcia Carranco enjoys spending time with his wife Ana Cecilia, and his three boys (Juan Pablo, Santiago and Alejandro). He has also been practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for many years and loves animals.

  Education:

  Link: G. Daniel Garcia Carranco

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  Zachary D. Norris

  Of Counsel

  Mr. Norris specializes in trials, focusing on personal injury, maritime, business claims, insurance claims, and consumer protection. Through his extensive litigation experience, Mr. Norris has worked in high pressure litigation with millions of dollars at stake. Mr. Norris also worked for a large maritime insurance defense firm for several years, defending major offshore oil companies in Jones Act and Longshore claims. From his experiences, he understands the complexities and strategies that insurers and companies use against individuals. This deep knowledge has become a major advantage for his clients who hire Mr. Norris to serve their legal needs. Raised in rough and tumble Odessa, Texas, Mr. Norris champions his clients’ cases with the bravado of a West Texas gunslinger and the guts of a high stakes poker player. However, litigation often requires finesse and stage presence. As a former performing classical pianist and Americana singer and song writer in his youth, Mr. Norris feels at home on the stage of the courtroom and can command the attention and respect of the jury and the judge. A lawsuit is very much like a game of chess, but with four players which include the two opposing legal teams and the two opposing parties. In today’s fast paced world of instant communication and computerized access to information, it is the lawyer able to quickly assimilate and incorporate that information and nimbly adjust his strategies who will win “the game.” Mr. Norris prides himself on his ability to take a detailed and complicated fact scenario and boil it down to its core essence in order to communicate his client’s story to the jury. It is this special combination of skills and sense of relentlessness which Mr. Norris brings to the bar for each and every one of his clients. Mr. Norris believes passionately in his clients’ causes and knows that the decks are often stacked against the individual and the party wronged. Mr. Norris is not afraid to take on large opponents with million dollar budgets and has out litigated lawyers with decades more experience to make sure that his clients get everything to which they are entitled. Mr. Norris truly believes that plaintiff litigation is one of the truest expressions of self-governance in our democratic system. Through litigating for his clients, Mr. Norris believes that we can change corporate policies that injure people and damage consumers, that we can change insurance practices that negatively affect both the injured person and the insured, and that overall we can make our nation a safer place with standards that are equal and fair for everyone.

  Education:

  Link: Zachary D. Norris