White & Case announced Monday that Patrick Johnson, former co-chair of the energy transition practice at Bracewell, has joined its firm as a Houston-based partner working within its global project development and finance practice team.
Johnson joins the firm after spending almost eight years as partner and co-chair of Bracewell’s energy transition group.
“Patrick’s broad experience in energy projects further enhances our renewables and energy transition capabilities in Houston, a key U.S. market,” Eric Leicht (New York), a member of White & Case’s executive committee, said in a recent release.
In the release, Leicht also noted that Johnson’s addition deepens the energy team’s roster at a critical time due to the firm seeing investments in the industry continuing to grow globally, fueled primarily by AI’s rapid growth.
White & Case plans to leverage Johnson’s diverse experience across the global energy market to help it serve its clients during this uptick and beyond.
However, Johnson isn’t the firm’s only add due to this recent uptick; it has been steadily building out its team within its energy platform for quite some time, adding Monica Hwang and Peter Berg to its Houston practice and Nadav Klugman to its Chicago practice throughout 2024.
“Deepening our energy practice bench and expanding our US energy transition and renewables capabilities is a key part of our strategy given the global trends in the energy industry,” Jay Cuclis, White & Case’s Houston office executive partner and co-head of its energy industry group, said in a recent release.
In addition to leveraging Johnson’s broad experience within the energy industry and representing its businesses, another area of Johnson’s expertise that White & Case plans to leverage is his experience representing private equity investors, alternative lenders, and financial institutions in a diverse grouping of transaction types, including joint venture arrangements, acquisitions and divestitures of assets and companies, project development, and structured and project finance.
Johnson graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and received his law degree from The University of Texas School of Law in 2012.
After graduating, Johnson spent nearly three years as a commercial litigator at Bracewell. Following his first stint there, he served as in-house counsel at ExxonMobil for two years until 2017, when he eventually rejoined Bracewell for his most recent go-around with the firm. While at ExxonMobil, Johnson primarily worked on upstream, midstream and infrastructure cases.