Andrew Elkhoury, ’15, Featured as Law360 Rising Star
Rising Star: Elkhoury Law's Andrew Elkhoury
Andrew Elkhoury has made a successful transition from BigLaw to solo practice at Houston-based Elkhoury Law PLLC, highlighted by his selection by Texas' Harris County to develop and implement a design-build program for its future construction projects — earning him a spot among the construction law practitioners under age 40 honored by Law360 as Rising Stars.
Biggest deal of his career:
As an associate at Norton Rose Fulbright from 2015 to 2018 and then at Mayer Brown LLP, Elkhoury got to work on several large cases that drew national attention, including litigation related to permitting for the Dakota Access Pipeline permitting and the sinking Millennium Tower in San Francisco.
But soon after going out on his own in March 2025, he secured a career milestone: Harris County, the nation's third-most populous county, hired him as lead outside counsel to guide the development and implementation of a design-build general conditions program to govern how it goes about procuring and executing construction projects.
"This is one of the largest local governments in the country, and they'd never done design-build construction before, and they chose me to lead the charge and not only come up with the general conditions but work through what they would look like, how the county wants to do things, how that translates into paper and contracts, and then all the regulatory and legal overlay going into that," he said.
Elkhoury worked on setting up the program's framework from last winter into spring. One of the biggest challenges, he said, was taking "a bunch of different institutional actors that play different roles and getting everybody to work together on something that isn't just going to solve or deal with a single project but essentially generations' worth of projects." He had to gather their input and make sure everything was sound both from a construction and a practical standpoint.
"It was a really fun, really novel, exciting challenge to get to work on," he said. "Now, we're seeing projects come through that process, and it's super rewarding."
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