A small firm, built around long relationships.
Valorem Law Group is a professional law corporation focused on the legal work that quietly underwrites a life — protecting what matters, structuring the businesses that carry it forward, and stewarding the Louisiana mineral interests passed down through families. We are also a general civil litigation firm, ready to advocate for clients when those matters reach the courtroom.
Our philosophy
Most legal documents we read have been written for someone else. Boilerplate is fast, but it rarely fits — and the gaps it leaves behind tend to surface at exactly the wrong moments.
We started Valorem to push back against that quietly: to draft fewer documents, more carefully, and to know our clients well enough to anticipate what's coming. That requires keeping the practice small and the work concentrated.
Who we serve
We work with individuals, couples, families, and the closely held businesses they build. Many clients come to us at inflection points — a marriage, the birth of a child, the founding of a company, a sale, a death in the family — moments when the right counsel matters more than usual.
We are equally comfortable drafting a first will and structuring a multi-generational gifting plan; forming a single-member LLC and authoring an operating agreement that contemplates the harder conversations among partners.
How we charge
Estate planning and entity formation are quoted as flat fees, communicated in writing before work begins. Because the scope of contested matters cannot be fixed in advance, flat fees do not apply to civil litigation; litigation, along with oil & gas matters and ongoing counsel, is billed at agreed hourly rates. Those rates are set to reflect the principle behind our name — ad valorem, according to value — so that what we charge tracks the worth we return: the highest value delivered for our clients. We believe legal services are easier to engage when their cost, and the value behind it, is known.
We also lean on carefully chosen AI tools to handle the routine, time-consuming parts of legal work — research, document review, and first drafts — so that the attorney’s time is spent where judgment actually matters. The efficiency those tools create is passed directly to our clients in the form of lower fees, not added to our margin.
Where we practice
Valorem Law Group, A Professional Law Corporation, is a Louisiana law firm. Our attorney is licensed to practice law only in the State of Louisiana, and we represent clients exclusively on matters governed by Louisiana law. We do not offer or provide legal services in any jurisdiction in which we are not licensed to practice.
Three decades at the same kind of work.
Valorem is a single-attorney practice by design. The lawyer who answers your first call is the lawyer who drafts your documents and the lawyer who picks up the phone fifteen years later when something changes.
Thomas J. Adair
Tom Adair is a practicing Louisiana attorney with more than thirty years of experience counseling individuals, families, and closely held businesses. He founded Valorem Law Group to do the work the way he believes it should be done — in unhurried conversation, with documents drafted to fit the people they are meant to serve.
His practice is concentrated where careful drafting matters most: estate planning and successions, the formation and stewardship of closely held companies, the Louisiana-specific discipline of oil & gas law, and general civil litigation when disputes must be resolved in court. Three decades of work in those areas means few situations are entirely new to him — and the ones that are receive the same patient attention as the rest.
Clients describe him as direct, plainspoken, and unusually thorough. He returns calls the same day. He explains documents in language a non-lawyer can follow. And he keeps his client list small enough that long-running matters never become someone else's file.
- Bar Admission
- Louisiana State Bar Association
- Licensed to practice law only in Louisiana
- Practice Areas
- Estate planning & successions
- Business formation & counsel
- Oil & gas law
- General civil litigation
- Experience
- 30+ years in active practice
- Louisiana law firms and private practice
- Approach
- Direct, deliberate, and plainspoken
- Flat fees on core engagements; long client relationships
Curious whether we're the right fit? Let's talk.
Schedule a consultationThe information on this website is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Communication with Valorem Law Group through this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Valorem Law Group, A Professional Law Corporation, and its attorneys are licensed to practice law only in the State of Louisiana. We do not offer or provide legal services in any jurisdiction in which we are not licensed to practice.