Angela De La Housaye is the founder and CEO of DLHA Law Group, a full-service business law firm based in Walnut Creek, California. She founded the firm in 2000 and has built it over 26 years into a growing team of attorneys and professionals. She is a 2025 Lawyers of Distinction honoree for Excellence in Civil Litigation, a recipient of the Walnut Creek Chamber's Business Person of the Year award, a Certified Women Owned Business, and a past Chair of the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce.
I asked Angela what led her to start her own firm.
"I wanted to have a third child, and the partners at the firm I was at were not excited about that," she told me. "I didn't want to start a pregnancy and delivery and have a new baby in a negative environment where I was already swimming upstream."
She left and launched her own practice and was immediately surprised by what happened next.
"Almost all my clients came with me," she said. "And so I thought, okay, well, maybe that means something."
It did. And it gave her the clarity to build something she had been thinking about: a firm grounded in work-life balance and genuine trust.
"I started thinking about what it would be like to start a firm where, if you bring people on, you trust that they'll get the work done and they'll also be valued as a whole human being," she said.
The firm started in Los Angeles and grew organically, eventually taking root in Walnut Creek. Twenty-six years later, Angela describes one of her most significant professional breakthroughs as something that took nearly 15 years to arrive: learning to collaborate openly with other attorneys.
"Once I broke through those limitations I set for myself and started really working with and leaning on other attorneys - that was a real breakthrough."
Today, the firm runs on a client-focused service model built around ten core tenets the team revisits in weekly meetings, examining real examples of where they hit the mark and where they fell short. Angela stays closely attuned to how every person on the team is doing, and she repositions people when they aren't in the right role. Someone who struggles in litigation might be an exceptional writer. Someone who doesn't love one area of law might thrive in another. She looks for the fit rather than forcing it.
That same attentiveness shows up in how she treats her team as people, not just professionals. An employee who fasts on Tuesdays for religious reasons now works from home that day. When a team member lost power at home, the firm offered to put him up in a hotel. Law clerks studying for the bar receive care baskets. When someone has a baby, the firm celebrates.
"I really try to stay very closely attuned to how people are doing, no matter who they are. Valuing them. And from that, people really feel a part of the process. They want to do well."
Angela's civic engagement is also a meaningful part of how she shows up for her clients and her community. She is a past Chair of the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce, a graduate of Leadership Contra Costa, and a frequent speaker on business law and preventative legal protections for business owners.
Are you a business owner in the Bay Area looking for full-service legal counsel? Connect with Angela De La Housaye Ashley and check out DLHA Law Group (a dba of De La Housaye & Associates, A Law Corporation).