About Lauren Kaye
Lauren Kaye Valastro built a career that moves between courtrooms, law firms and classrooms. She trained at Texas Tech, completing a B.A. in 2008 and a J.D. in 2012 from Texas Tech University School of Law. Those years set a pattern: practical legal work alongside teaching and scholarly engagement.
Early in her legal life she served as a judicial clerk in the 72nd Judicial District of Texas in 2010. That early exposure to litigation and opinion-writing prefaced a series of roles in private practice. After law school she joined Greer, Herz & Adams, LLP in 2012 and later worked at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP beginning in 2014. She became a partner at Diamond McCarthy LLP in 2020, where she handled matters that required both transactional acuity and courtroom experience.
Her career shifted in the early 2020s toward roles that combine practice and teaching. In 2022 she took a faculty post as an Assistant Professor of Business Law at Louisiana State University—Shreveport. The same year she began serving as Investment Counsel at Legalist, a role that placed legal judgment alongside investment analysis. In 2023 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, teaching students while maintaining connections to practice.
Across these positions she has worked on corporate and business law issues, counsel matters and litigation strategy. Her time in firms and her work as investment counsel gave her repeated encounters with corporate governance questions, contract disputes and commercial litigation. Classroom work has allowed her to test legal theories against live business problems and to bring practitioners’ perspectives to students.
Valastro also participates in scholarly and professional networks. She is a member of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, an organization where academics and practitioners exchange research and teaching methods. Her dual presence in practice and academia has shaped how she approaches both research topics and client problems.
Colleagues describe her as someone who moves easily between detailed document work and teaching obligations. She has kept a steady presence in Texas law while taking on roles elsewhere, a pattern that reflects an interest in combining practice, teaching and policy-minded inquiry. As of 2026 she is affiliated with Legalist and continues to split her time between legal work and academic roles, concentrating on business law, commercial disputes and the intersection of legal practice and business decision-making.
