About

Matt McChesney is a trial attorney focused on family law, meaning matters involving matrimonial, property, and child conservatorship law. 

For the last sixteen years Mr. McChesney presented cases to the bench and to juries in seventeen Texas counties, with a focus on serving spouses, partners, parents, and grandparents in Travis, Williamson, and Hays Counties.

On the child side, Matt has experience negotiating and advocating in court for custom parenting plans respecting the needs and interests of children and with due regard for special circumstances of parents of differing parental abilities.  Matt has worked to develop parenting plans involving autism spectrum children, disabled children, and children requiring emotional and educational accommodation in schools and at home.  Matt has also developed parenting plans reunifying alienated children with an estranged parent and restricting an impaired or abusive parent's access to children. 

On the property side, Matt has experience characterizing and valuing assets of a variety of types including real estate, closely held businesses, intellectual property, working ranches, art and antiques, and a variety of retirement accounts and other investments.  Matt has negotiated and advocated in court in circumstances involving disputed characterizations, valuations, disputed buy out and financing terms, controverted confirmations of separate property, and disproportionate community estate divisions.   

Matt often speaks at continuing legal education events.  He taught lawyers and judges as plenary panel course faculty at the state-wide annual Advanced Family Law Conference and local events around the state on topics ranging from standing and conservatorship child issues, the nuances of informal marriage doctrines and case law, and the technical aspects of securing judgments.  Matt spoke at the Texas Supreme Court, the State Bar Annual Meeting, the Austin Bar Association, and he consults on issues of matrimonial law and trial strategy with other attorneys. 

Matt loves family law for the broad range of skills it asks of its better practitioners -- from the heady and technical presentation of data in a financial spreadsheet, to the big picture in persuasive speaking about broader solutions to complex family problems.  Matt believes that when family law is done right the adults and children involved get out of bad situations into healthier, more secure, more sustainable positions where they can flourish again without the noise and strife that brought them to the process.  

Before Matt began his private practice dedicated to family law, he worked at the international commercial law firm of Baker Botts in Houston and the civil legal aid organization, Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.  While in college at the turn of the century, Matt studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and backpacked around Europe on breaks.  Between college and law school, Matt took a course aimed at learning Spanish at a university in Argentina and spent the rest of almost two years in South America backpacking the continent from Brazil, down the cone, and back up through the high Andes in Peru.   

Matt speaks French and Spanish and can assist in the preparation of home-state petitions for return of children pursuant to the Hague Convention.

Matt attended public schools and is an Eagle Scout.