Why Choose DPS Legal Counsel
A Business Law Firm for Health Professionals and Entrepreneurs
I’m Dan Smith, the founder of DPS Legal Counsel. I am a business attorney for small business entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals.
My mission at DPS Legal Counsel is straightforward.
I seek to combine my experience across a abroad spectrum of business law niches, including healthcare transactions and regulation, business formation and operation, franchising, intellectual property, contracts, business transactions and disputes, federal and Tennessee tax controversies, and tax planning, with a commonsense and practical philosophy of providing plain-language legal advice and counsel to my clients.
Much of the law impacting businesses and healthcare practices is complex, requiring a sensitivity and familiarity with a number of statutes and regulations, ranging from the Internal Revenue Code and federal Treasury Regulations on the one hand to the numerous statutes and regulations applicable to the business of healthcare on the other.
But at DPS Legal Counsel, my goal is to simplify the complex for my healthcare and business clients.
I graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where I was a member of The Phi Beta Kappa Society. I obtained my law degree from Vanderbilt University’s School of Law, where I was an associate editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. In addition, I have an LL.M. (Master of Laws) in Taxation from New York University.
I am admitted to practice law in Tennessee. I am also admitted to practice before the United States District Court, Western District of Tennessee, the United States District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, and the United States Tax Court.
I am a member of the Tennessee Bar Association and also a Fellow in the Nashville Bar Foundation. I am a member of the American Health Law Association.
I have received an AV®Preeminent™ peer review rating from Martindale-Hubbell®.
Every Business Should Have a “Why.” Here’s Mine.
In a famous speech given on April 23, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt said “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
I discovered this quotation years ago from an old, yellowed clipping taped to the front of my mother’s business telephone file (she and my father were entrepreneurs, owning a small real estate company). I have never forgotten that moment of discovery.
Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena not only resonated with me, I was moved that my mother had also seen the beauty of Roosevelt’s words.
I have always been drawn to the entrepreneurial life myself. That is why I practice law.
And it is why I choose to work with physicians and their independent solo and small group practices and entrepreneurs and their small businesses.
In today’s rapidly changing and increasingly complex business environment, independent and entrepreneurial physicians in solo and small group practices and small business owners are the ultimate men and women in the Arena.