Our Attorneys

Walter Wm. Hofheinz

Walter Wm. Hofheinz has practiced estate planning and probate law in Texas for more than forty years, and has been Board Certified, Estate Planning and Probate Law — Texas Board of Legal Specialization since 1984.

His planning practice runs the full range of the work in order to accomplish the client’s desires with least expense and inconvenience over the entire planning lifecycle. It extends to dispositive planning, estate tax and generation-skipping transfer tax planning, trust drafting, and marital property agreements.

He handles testate and intestate estates, counseling executors and administrators through the procedures Texas offers, and through the deadlines that attach to each. Texas sets a schedule for notice to beneficiaries and creditors and for filing an inventory, and a fiduciary who misses it can face consequences personally. He has administered estates under documents he drafted and under documents drafted by other lawyers, which is a useful vantage: it is one thing to know what a provision was meant to accomplish, and another to watch it work out in practice.

He also handles contested matters, including breach of fiduciary duty claims, Will contests, and disputes over beneficiary rights. Separately, he serves as a consulting and testifying expert in matters involving estate planning, trust, and probate practice — including questions of the standard of care in drafting, fiduciary duty, and the reasonableness of attorney’s fees.

From 1991 to 1997 he was an Associate Professor at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, now Texas A&M University School of Law, where he taught property, estate planning, and pre-trial civil procedure. Earlier he was an adjunct professor at McMurry College. As a student at the University of Texas School of Law he was research assistant to Professor Stanley M. Johanson. He has written and spoken for the State Bar of Texas Professional Development Program, the Advanced Estate Planning and Probate Course, Baylor Law School’s General Practice Institute, the University of Houston Law Center, and South Texas College of Law’s Wills and Probate Institute — more than a hundred papers and presentations, on subjects from generation-skipping transfer tax planning to the ethics of what a lawyer owes a client before drafting begins. His article “Estate Planning for Those Without Testamentary Capacity” appeared in the Texas Bar Journal.

He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law in 1979 and his B.A. from McMurry College. He practiced in San Antonio and Fort Worth before opening his own office in 1982, in Abilene and later in Dallas, and has practiced as part of Hofheinz Heinen PLLC since 2017. He is admitted before the Supreme Court of Texas and all Texas courts, the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Tax Court, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Circuits, and the United States District Courts for the Northern and Western Districts of Texas.

He was named Lawyer of the Year in 2006 by the General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Section of the State Bar of Texas, is AV Preeminent rated by Martindale-Hubbell, and is a member of the College of the State Bar of Texas.

Email: wwh@hhtexaslaw.com

Tessa Heinen

Tessa Heinen is the managing member of Hofheinz Heinen PLLC, where her practice is estate planning, estate administration, and fiduciary litigation.

Her planning work runs from foundational documents through dispositive, estate tax and generation-skipping transfer tax planning, trust drafting, marital property agreements, and the formation and maintenance of the business entities.

She has primary responsibility for the firm’s probate proceedings, which she handles across Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton and Rockwall counties. Procedure and local practice vary more between Texas counties than most people expect, and knowing what a particular court will want — and when — materially affects how long an administration takes and what it costs.

She counsels executors and administrators, and she works to keep an administration from becoming adversarial where it does not need to be. Where a dispute is genuine, she handles contested matters, including breach of fiduciary duty claims, Will contests, and disputes over beneficiary rights.

She writes and speaks regularly for the Texas bar, principally on drafting and administration. Her recent papers include “Know Better, Do Better: Tailoring Statutory Forms,” delivered at the 35th Annual Estate Planning and Probate Drafting Course in November 2024, and “Expect Twists and Turns: Understanding the Interplay of Operative Documents in Estate Planning and Administration,” delivered at the Intermediate Estate Planning and Probate Course in June 2024. She has presented at State Bar of Texas Annual Meetings on balancing fiduciary and beneficiary interests, on practical trust drafting, and on the Texas Durable Power of Attorney Act, and has spoken to law students at St. Mary’s University School of Law on what is actually involved in opening a law practice.

She served as Chair of the General Practice and Solo Section of the State Bar of Texas in 2021, after six years on its council and terms as Secretary and Chair-Elect. She has been a member of the College of the State Bar of Texas and of the Patrick E. Higginbotham Inn of Court.

Ms. Heinen earned her J.D. magna cum laude from SMU Dedman School of Law in 2013, where she was a student attorney in the Civil Clinic and a teaching assistant, and where she externed for the Honorable Irma Carrillo Ramirez of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. She holds a B.A. in Economics, with a minor in Biology, from the University of Texas at Austin. She was admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 2013, practiced on her own from 2013 to 2017, and has been Of Counsel to the Law Office of Walter Wm. Hofheinz since 2013 — beginning there as a legal research assistant while still in law school.

Email: tessa@hhtexaslaw.com