Bella Law represents Texas healthcare owners from formation to the sale, from an office in Houston.

Texas is the firm's home state and the one it knows from the inside. Its founder and managing attorney, Babak Kalbasigharavi, opened his first Texas home health agency in 2006. He built, ran and sold healthcare businesses here for the twenty years before he practiced law. The work below is what the firm does for a Texas owner, in the order an owner meets it.

Forming a Texas practice or health-tech company so a buyer finds nothing to argue with later

Texas bars the corporate practice of medicine, so who may own the entity is the first question in every Texas formation. The firm forms the professional association or PLLC the physicians own, and the management company that holds everything else. It writes the agreement between them at a fee that keeps clear of the fee-splitting rules in Occupations Code chapter 102. Where a nonprofit health organization certified by the Texas Medical Board fits, the firm builds that instead.

For a health-tech founder in Austin, Dallas or Houston the work is the entity, the equity and its vesting. It is the assignment of every line of code and the founder agreements, written once. For a clinician opening a practice it is the professional entity and the operating agreement. It is also the enrollment file, and the state reads that file again at every later change of ownership.

Of the last 38 owners who wrote to this firm, 16 were forming a practice and 19 were building a health-tech product (Bella Law inbound, April to August 2026). Most of that work is Texas work.

Read more: who may own a Texas practice. The Startups and Founders page covers the engagement.

Keeping a Texas digital health product inside HIPAA, the FDA line and the Texas privacy layer

A Texas health-tech company answers to federal rules first, HIPAA and the FDA device rules, and then to a state layer most out-of-state lawyers never read. Texas has its own medical records privacy act. It has a breach-notice statute with a 30-day report to the Attorney General at 250 residents. Since July 2024 it has a consumer data protection act that exempts HIPAA covered entities and reaches everyone else. The firm maps a product against all of it before it reads a statute to you.

The enforcement record says where companies get caught. Of the HIPAA actions the Office for Civil Rights closed in 2025, 76% included a finding on a missing or inadequate risk analysis (HIPAA Journal, 2025). The firm writes that document, writes the business associate agreements to your stack, and puts the open questions in writing with the facts that would close them.

Your engineering lead is welcome on the first call.

The Digital Health and AI page covers the engagement.

Selling a Texas home health, hospice, behavioral health or physician business, with the license and the non-compete handled

Texas asks nothing of a seller before closing and everything at the license. No Texas law requires notice of a healthcare sale to the state. The license, though, does not transfer. A home health or hospice license becomes invalid on the date ownership changes, and the buyer files its own application at least 30 days before (26 Tex. Admin. Code §§ 558.23, 558.25). The firm runs that timeline and the Medicaid enrollment change at TMHP. It files the federal change of ownership for a certified provider and obtains the Comptroller's Certificate of No Tax Due the buyer will ask for.

Since September 1, 2025 a Texas physician non-compete may run no longer than one year and five miles, with a buyout capped at one year's pay (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 15.50, as amended by SB 1318). That changes what a buyer is paying for in a practice, and the firm reads every physician agreement for renewal dates before the letter of intent.

The engagement runs from exit readiness through the letter of intent, diligence, the purchase agreement, and the obligations that survive closing. The work is to get the price up, get the terms right, and protect the people who helped you build it.

Read more: Texas transaction notice, the Texas license on a change of ownership, Texas physician non-competes, what a Texas seller files, in order. The Acquisition and Exit page covers the engagement.

The engagement is the same in every jurisdiction: one figure, one scope, and the attorney who took the first call

The first conversation is confidential, runs about twenty minutes, and carries no charge. Within forty-eight hours you receive one flat fee against a written scope that names the date the work ends. The attorney who takes the first call does the work, and the firm keeps a limited number of matters open at once so that promise holds.

Babak Kalbasigharavi is admitted to the State Bar of Texas, and the firm's office is at 845 Texas Avenue, Suite 200, Houston. Texas clients are seen in Houston and by video anywhere in the state. He is also admitted in New York and Alaska, and he is not admitted in Florida. A matter under another state's law runs with co-counsel in that state, named to you before any work starts.

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Questions owners ask about the firm and Texas

This page describes the firm's services and is attorney advertising. The page is general information as of September 25, 2026, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Figures and rules on this page: Bella Law inbound, April to August 2026 (38 leads); HIPAA Journal, 2025 OCR enforcement summary; 26 Tex. Admin. Code §§ 558.23, 558.25; Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 15.50 as amended by SB 1318 (eff. 2025-09-01); Tex. Occ. Code ch. 102 and § 162.001; Tex. Bus. & Com. Code §§ 521.053 (as amended by SB 768, 2023) and ch. 541 (eff. 2024-07-01); Tex. Tax Code § 111.020. Each is treated at length in the Texas article series linked above.