Southern California
Counsel to public agencies
and the people who build with them.
Martin Adams APC advises cities, special districts, and private clients in municipal and local government, real estate, litigation, administrative, and appellate matters — from the dais to the Court of Appeal.
Practice Areas
Five disciplines, one bench of judgment.
Public agency work rarely stays in one lane. A land use approval becomes a writ; a writ becomes an appeal. We practice across the whole arc so the strategy holds from the first staff report to the last brief.
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Municipal & Local Government
City attorney and general counsel services for cities, special districts, and public agencies across Southern California.
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Real Estate
Acquisition, disposition, entitlement, and development of commercial and public property.
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Litigation
Trial representation in California state and federal court, from pre-suit strategy through judgment.
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Administrative
Representation before regulatory agencies, boards, commissions, and in administrative hearings.
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Appellate
Appeals and extraordinary writs in the California Courts of Appeal, the California Supreme Court, and the Ninth Circuit.
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The Firm
We build the record before anyone needs it.
Most of the matters that become expensive were survivable earlier. An agenda description written with care, an objection made with specificity, an administrative record assembled while the facts are still at hand — these are small disciplines that decide large outcomes.
That is how we work: close enough to the day-to-day to catch the problem early, and experienced enough in the appellate courts to know exactly which details will matter if it ever gets there.
Meet the firmInsights
Notes from the practice.
- Land Use & Real Estate
September 4, 2026
Building a CEQA Record That Survives Review
CEQA cases are won and lost on the administrative record, and the record is largely built before anyone contemplates litigation. By the time a petition is filed, the material facts are fixed. The record is a project deliverable It helps to treat the administrative record as something the project produces, alongside the plans and the staff report. Every substantive comment, technical study, and response is a component of it, and each one is assembled far more cheaply in real time than...
- Municipal Law
September 4, 2026
Five Brown Act Missteps That Turn a Routine Closed Session Into Litigation
The Ralph M. Brown Act is short, old, and deceptively simple. Most of the closed-session problems we are asked to clean up are not the product of bad faith. They are the product of an agenda description written in a hurry. 1. The agenda description is too thin Government Code section 54954.5 supplies safe-harbor language for the common closed session categories. Agencies that depart from it to be more concise frequently end up describing the item so generally that the public cannot tell what...
- Litigation & Appeals
September 4, 2026
Preserving the Record: What Trial Counsel Should Do Before There Is an Appeal
Appellate lawyers spend a great deal of time reading records that cannot support the argument the case needs. Almost every one of those problems was fixable at trial, at little cost, by counsel who was thinking one level up. Objections have to be specific A general objection preserves very little. The objection should name the ground, and where an evidentiary ruling matters, counsel should make an offer of proof detailed enough that a reviewing court can evaluate what was excluded. Get the...
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