(985) 310-6900 Tel.
(985) 320-6554 Cell
About Me
I started life born into a working class family in the late 1960’s. I was adopted by my maternal grandparents before I knew any differently, and we all lived together off and on through the 70’s and 80’s. There was constant turmoil in our house, and we moved seven times before I was eighteen.
In school I was always the littlest guy in my class, , and I quickly learned what it was like to be bullied. I had run-ins with bullies quite a bit. For some reason, even as a little kid, when faced with a bully much bigger than me, I wouldn’t back down. I still don’t. I learned to love books and reading, and wrote my first short story in the fourth grade. In the latter part of my childhood, writing fiction became my refuge, along with performing music (trumpet, piano, guitar and voice) and spending time in church (First Baptist, Amite. I’m Episcopalian now).
In college at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, I did the sensible thing and majored in business. I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Washington D.C. studying Economics at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and working on Capitol Hill. It was in Washington where I learned one of my most valuable life lessons. Riding the elevator and the subway with the powerful people I saw on the evening news and on CSPAN every day, I realized they didn’t have a halo over their head, and that they were not any better than me or anyone else—they just had power.
Back home in Hammond, the performing arts continued to pull at me, and I joined the SLU Concert Choir and won roles in a couple of musicals. It was in the midst of a choir perfomance where I crossed paths briefly with a stunning but reserved harpist from LSU that I wouldn’t see again for two years when we were both in a production of My Fair Lady. Her name was Sedley Font, and she married me a year later. We have three beautiful children: our boys are short like me, and our daughter is tall and graceful.
During law school, I was drawn to criminal and family law, and was fortunate to work for State District Judges Ray Chutz in Amite and M. Douglas Hughes in Livingston before I was sworn in as a new attorney. I was fortunate to learn the criminal practice from three great criminal attorneys, Frank Holthaus in Baton Rouge, Wayne Stewart in Livingston Parish, and Ron Macaluso in Hammond. Most recently I was fortunate enough to learn from Gerry Spence in Wyoming at the Trial Lawyer’s College Death Penalty School. Each of these brilliant legal minds have helped make me the attorney I am today.
Over the last two decades, I’ve represented hundreds of criminal defendants with charges from DWI charges to homicide, and families in divorce, child support, custody, and child protection cases. What I’ve discovered is that many of the lessons I learned early in life still apply: Whether the bully is a current or former spouse, another lawyer, a prosecutor, or a judge, bullies only stop bullying when someone stands up to them. As your attorney, I will defend your family, your rights and your reputation aggressively. Please call me at (985) 310-6900, email me at dbrown@dougbrownlaw.com, or come by my office at 406 West Morris Ave., Suite C, Hammond, LA 70403. If it matters to you, it matters to me.