Pressler's current law firm is Woodfill & Pressler in Houston, with his senior partner Jared Woodfill, who was the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party from 2002 to 2014. Pressler is married to the former Nancy Avery, originally from Illinois, the daughter of the attorney William H. Avery and the former Eugenie "Jean" Petrequin (1910-2013), a native of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a graduate of Smith College, and an active Presbyterian, who spent much of her adulthood in Winnetka in Cook County north of Chicago. The Presslers have two daughters, Jean I. Pressler Visy and husband, Joe, of Silver Spring, Maryland, and Anne L. Pressler Csorba and her husband, Les, and a son, Paul Pressler, IV, all of Houston. Pressler served in the Texas House from Harris County as a Democrat for one two-year term from 1957 to 1959, having been elected in 1956, when Price Daniel left the United States Senate to win the first of his three terms as governor of Texas. He worked for the law firm of Vinson and Elkins. Thereafter, in 1970, Democratic Governor Preston Smith appointed Pressler to the 133rd District Court in Harris County, a position to which he was subsequently elected and held until 1978. Pressler was from 1978 until 1992 a justice of the 14th Texas Court of Appeals in Houston. At some point in the late 1970s, he switched his affiliation to Republican and served on that party's Texas Republican State Executive Committee. He supported Ronald W. Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush for U.S. President. He was initially a supporter of U.S. Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. After Thompson left the race, Pressler served as an elector for U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona. In 1989, the first President Bush proposed to nominate Judge Pressler as the director of the Office of Government Ethics, but opposition from theologically liberal opponents in the Southern Baptist Convention persuaded Pressler not to pursue the appointment. Since 2000, Pressler has been a senior partner with the Houston firm Woodfill and Pressler, where he is engaged in the practice of mediation law and has international clients. One of his former law partners is incoming state Representative Briscoe Cain of Deer Park. He has served as a director for the National Association of Religious Broadcasters, the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, the Free Market Foundation, and the Philosophical Society of Texas.