One firm appears in roughly one of every seven agent-attributed Austin entitlement hearings.
Austin Development Watch maintains a structured record of every Planning Commission and Zoning & Platting Commission case in the public record — thousands of hearings since 2016, each tagged to the agent of record. That record answers a question the market has never had a clean answer to: which firms actually carry Austin’s entitlement docket?
| # | Firm | 10-yr hearings | Approved* | Postponed* | Lead attorneys (hearings) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Drenner Group | 632 | 39.7% | 59.1% | Amanda Swor (309), Leah Bojo (266), Dave Anderson (44) |
| 2 | Armbrust & Brown | 490 | 34.5% | 64.8% | Richard Suttle (224), Michael Whellan (166) |
| 3 | Thrower Design | 388 | 35.4% | 62.3% | Ron Thrower (294), Victoria Haase (90) |
| 4 | Alice Glasco Consulting | 226 | 39.4% | 59.7% | Alice Glasco (226) |
| 5 | Husch Blackwell | 131 | 23.2% | 75.2% | Nikelle Meade (98), Stacey Milazzo (31) |
| 6 | DuBois Bryant & Campbell | 97 | 43.8% | 53.1% | David Hartman (95) |
| 7 | LJA Engineering | 90 | 64.9% | 21.6% | T. Walter Hoysa (25), Russell Kotara (20) |
| 8 | Land Use Solutions | 75 | 31.0% | 69.0% | Michele Haussmann (75) |
| 9 | Metcalfe Wolff Stuart & Williams | 71 | 57.7% | 42.3% | Michele Rogerson Lynch (63) |
| 10 | BGE | 52 | 73.9% | 8.7% | Brian Grace (13), Chris Rawls (13) |
*Method: agent-attributed hearing rows at Austin PC + ZAP, 2016–June 2026, from ADW’s structured case database (~5,190 hearings; ~4,413 carry an attributed agent). “Approved” and “Postponed” are shares of decided outcomes (recommended/approved vs. postponed/indefinitely postponed), excluding still-pending items; with denials they total 100%. A “hearing” is one appearance of a case before a commission; a single project can generate several. Firm totals are reconciled to the case level and recomputed weekly — every figure traces to a record.
The market is concentrated at the top and long-tailed below. The four busiest firms — Drenner Group, Armbrust & Brown, Thrower Design and Alice Glasco Consulting — together carry nearly two of every five agent-attributed hearings (39%); everyone below operates as a boutique. Drenner sits clearly at #1, and within it just two attorneys — Amanda Swor and Leah Bojo — account for roughly 91% of the firm’s pipeline.
The sharper signal is in the outcome columns. Among the volume leaders the dominant result is neither approval nor denial — it is postponement: Drenner 59%, Armbrust 65%, Thrower 62%, with the zoning boutiques higher still. The exceptions are the engineering and site-plan firms — LJA (65% approved, 22% postponed), BGE (74% / 9%) — which clear fast with little continuance. The dividing line is the work: discretionary zoning moves slowly and gets continued; by-right engineering clears. For anyone selecting counsel, benchmarking a competitor, or underwriting how long a case will take, the firm on the filing is signal — and now it is measurable.
Built from public records (agendas, minutes, and meeting video). Figures trace to the Austin Development Watch structured dataset. Free to read and share with attribution. © 2026 Texas Entitlement / Austin Development Watch · [email protected]