Gary Farmer ’84 helped put Austin on the map. Adam Loewy ’03 put himself on billboards all over it.
Two Texas Law alumni, two unlikely paths—and two success stories that prove a legal education can take you places you never imagined. Both sat down with host Sara Light for the Texas Exes “Hello Longhorn” podcast series, which introduces UT Austin alumni entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Gary Farmer grew up in West Columbia, Texas, and it wasn’t until a week at Boys State on the UT campus after his junior year of high school that everything clicked. “It didn’t take the whole week before I knew without any question that I was coming here,” he says. He went home and told his parents: “I’m going straight to Austin, Texas. No questions asked.”
Once on campus, Farmer did what he’d always been taught: if you have something to offer, offer it. He joined a fraternity, not knowing an alpha from an omega, and found his people. The story of how he found them is pure Texas. At convocation at Disch-Falk Field, he walked to his assigned seat and the first person he encountered said, “Hi, I’m Gary Farmer.” “I’m Gary Farmer from West Columbia,” he replied. “I’m Gary Farmer from Mineral Wells,” said the stranger. The two knew each other all through school and spent years getting each other’s mail.
After earning both a BBA and a law degree from UT, Farmer set his sights on commercial real estate, but with one small problem. “I had a stack of student debt that a show dog couldn’t jump over.”
When a friend called in early 1985 to say a new title company in Austin was looking for a rainmaker and had been given his name, Farmer thought it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. But he embraced the moment, seized the opportunity, and never looked back.
As president of Heritage Title Company for nearly 41 years and founding chairman of Opportunity Austin—which he launch in 2003—Farmer helped shape Austin’s economy in ways few can match, having brought in more than 900 companies and 800,000 jobs to the region. The strategy was simple but powerful: marry Austin’s natural assets with a plan. “Jobs for families, return for taxpayers, opportunity for corporations,” he says. “Nine words.”
For Farmer, it all comes back to the network he built at UT and the lesson his parents instilled early. “One of the most important things you get from UT is the network you build while you’re here—and you don’t build that unless you join things.” A devoted Longhorn and an even more devoted George Strait fan, Farmer received the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award and chose “If It Wasn’t for Texas” as his walk-up song. The choice was easy. “If it wasn’t for Texas, I would not be here. I wouldn’t be in this room, in this city. I wouldn’t have lived my life here, met my wife here, or raised my children here.”
Loewy arrived at Texas Law from St. Louis 25 years ago, convinced he’d end up doing corporate work “like what they did on LA Law.” Reality, as he puts it, set in quickly. “As I like to tell people, I was part of the class that made the top half possible.” He got a C in Torts—the very subject that would define his career—and somehow found his footing anyway. “Don’t worry about the grades,” he tells law students today. “Your career is very different from law school.” And the friendships he made at Texas Law? Still going strong decades later.
His path to building his own firm was anything but linear. After a brief and unhappy stint at a corporate bankruptcy firm in Dallas, Loewy moved back to Austin, got fired from his next job, and launched his firm in May 2005 from a one-bedroom apartment downtown with no clients and very little money. “It was not an overnight success, not a two-week success, not even a few-year success, but slowly I got clients.” About a year in, he found personal injury law—and never looked back.
Twenty years later, Loewy handles roughly 30 carefully selected cases at a time, focusing on catastrophic injuries and serious crashes. But equally defining is how he gives back. “Ever since I was young, I admired people who gave back,” he says. “There are a lot of people who make a lot of money and don’t. After you can take care of your needs and your family, what else are you doing with it?” Adam and his wife have opened a family playground, funded a garden building at the Central Texas Food Bank, and serve as corporate sponsors of Texas Longhorn athletics. In 2024, he endowed the Loewy Law Firm Scholarship at Texas Law.
For aspiring lawyers thinking about starting their own firm, his advice is simple: do it. “I always liken it to the leap of faith scene in Indiana Jones. Once you take the step, the bridge will come.”