David is a partner in the Litigation and Real Estate practices and co-chair of AGG’s Retail Industry team. David has concentrated his practice on complex civil litigation since becoming a lawyer in 1995.
While David handles a variety of high stakes disputes, he has developed a specialty in litigation related to commercial real estate and the retail industry. This focus gives him a unique understanding of how to solve problems that arise among owners, developers, managers, landlords, tenants, builders, and contractors. Clients hire him to resolve construction and leasing contract disputes, environmental nuisance and toxic tort matters, construction payment and defect claims, easement and right-of-way disputes, and various other disagreements over land use and ownership. When appropriate, David leverages his experience toward negotiating early and alternative resolutions to disputes.
David also has extensive experience handling banking and related lending matters. He has particular expertise litigating fraudulent conveyance claims, having chased evasive debtors for banks when real estate development crashed in the late 2000’s.
David’s practice is deeply rooted and personally inspired. Not long after leaving his first job as a civil litigator at the Georgia Attorney General’s office, David represented a family of nine brothers and sisters that had been fighting the State of Georgia for access to their family farm for 36 years. In that matter, David successfully won a jury verdict condemning an interest in land from the State for a private families’ use for the first time in history. Following that victory, David began focusing more on real estate litigation and has amassed a string of significant victories at trials, on appeals, and in arbitrations. In 2012, David moved his practice to AGG in large part due to this firm’s strong, national, commercial real estate practice. The combination has proven successful as David has continued to win real estate disputes, only now throughout the country instead of just in Georgia.
David is a dedicated community servant, both through AGG and other avenues. David chairs the firm’s Community Engagement Committee, directing AGG’s participation in volunteer and charitable activities. David also serves on the firm’s Diversity Committee. Outside of AGG, David is a Board Member of the Georgia Interfaith Public Policy Council. David also serves on The Temple’s Rothschild Social Justice Institute Council and chairs its Anti- Sex Trafficking group. David graduated from the Anti-Defamation League’s Glass Leadership Institute in 2010, has served on the ADL Southeastern Board of Directors, and currently sits on the ADL Civil Rights Committee.
As the beneficiary of valuable mentorship himself, David devotes significant time to helping young litigators learn from his experience. Many AGG attorneys have taken their first deposition, argued their first motion, and/or had their first jury trial on David’s cases. David started and runs AGG’s Trial Day litigation training exercise.
David is also a twice-published author. He is the Editor of the legal treatise, Georgia Nuisance Law, and wrote the narrative non-fiction book, Appalachian State Silences the Big House: Behind the Greatest Upset in College Football History, published by McFarland & Co. in 2017.