Akin Gump, Baker Botts and V&E Picking Up Dewey Partners

By Mark Curriden
A handful of partners from Dewey & LeBouef have decided to take their practices to Texas-based law firms, according to lawyers with close ties to the nearly defunct New York law firm.
Several other Dewey partners, those lawyers confirmed Sunday, are involved in serious negotiations to join Big Tex.
Three separate firms – Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Baker Botts and Vinson & Elkins – are expected to make individual announcements this week that up to a dozen lawyers from Dewey’s Houston, London, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Washington, DC offices are jumping to their firms.
Dewey, which just a couple years ago had 1,300 lawyers and revenues of $1 billion, employed a dozen lawyers in its Houston office at the start of 2012.
Four Dewey lawyers have committed to their new firms but have not yet announced. They include:

• Thomas Moore, who has served as co-head of Dewey’s energy mergers and acquisitions practice, has agreed to join Baker Botts in Houston as a partner. He is the lead lawyer representing Angola LNG in its ongoing $10 billion effort to eliminate gas flaring and monetize natural gas from the country’s oil fields. He is currently representing Chinese and Korean state-owned companies in acquisitions in Africa and South America.

• Steven Otillar, a M&A lawyer who specializes in the oil and gas sector, is joining Akin Gump in Houston as a partner. He has represented El Paso Corporation and other large publicly traded companies in energy transactions in Mexico, China, West Africa, and Latin America. He is the U.S. Regional Director for the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators.
• Nabil Khodadad, an energy and project finance lawyer in London, is joining V&E as a partner. A former partner at Chadbourne & Parke, Khodadad recently advised the Azerbajian state-owned oil company on a $750 million project financing in a major offshore and condensate fields.
• Andrew Nealon, also a project finance and energy lawyer in Dewey’s London office, will join V&E this week. Nealon represents HoodOil, which is a subsidiary of the largest business group in Yemen, in the financing of a refinery in Yemen. He also Represented the Moroccan state-owned utility Office National de l’Electricit é in connection with a tender a coal fired facility with an estimated project cost of more than $1.5 billion.
Some of the four lawyers still face a partnership vote approving their hire, but those are considered a formality.
Last week, Houston-based Dewey partner Charles Moore, who is the former general counsel of the Federal Regulatory Commission, announced that he is joining Morgan Lewis as a partner.
But potentially the most significant lateral moves could come later this week when V&E is expected to announce that as many as a dozen of Dewey’s intellectual property lawyers, most of them based on the West Coast, will be joining the firm.
Several of Dewey’s IP partners, including practice group co-chair Henry Bunsow, met with V&E’s leadership in Austin last week. Lawyers with knowledge of those discussions said that between three and 16 IP lawyers from Palo Alto, San Francisco and Washington, DC were considering V&E as a possible new home.
The addition would be viewed as a huge coup for V&E, which has been trying to expand its West Coast operation.
Bunsow alone would be a huge catch. The Blog of the Legal Times wrote last year that he had a $20 million book of business. Lawyers previously at Dewey said that is “exaggerated by a few million, but he’s a great lawyer and makes a lot of money for his law firm.”
In 2010, Bunsow represented Acushnet Co., which manufacturers Titleist golf products, in a huge patent infringement against Callaway involving its Pro V1 golf ball. Acushnet won.
Bunsow was the former vice chairman at Howrey, once a 500-lawyer firm that went bankrupt and dissolved in March 2011. Bunsow, former Howrey IP partner Joseph Lavelle and their group “jumped from Howrey as it was exploding last January to Dewey thinking they had landed at a stable situation,” said a former Dewey lawyer.
As the Dewey IP partners met at V&E’s office in Austin last week, they received an email from Dewey management that their copy and fax services had been shutdown.
“Bunsow and his team are experiencing Howrey 2.0,” one lawyer said. “They are just looking for a firm they know will not be shutting down this time next year.”
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