Dallas trial lawyer Jeremy Fielding has left litigation boutique Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst to join Kirkland & Ellis’ Dallas office, The Texas Lawbook has learned.
Fielding and officials at Kirkland declined to comment, but he is believed to be the first litigator to join Kirkland’s year-old Dallas office, according to the firm website. All other 44 attorneys listed practice a mix of corporate M&A, real estate, tax and private equity matters on the transactional side.
Fielding’s move comes two months after the firm announced it was launching a plaintiff-side trial group that tackles commercial litigation matters on a contingency or other alternative fee basis — seemingly a way to more directly compete with litigation boutiques, which historically have been the only type of firm to take commercial cases on these terms due to the high stakes.
Mike Lynn, the founding partner of Fielding’s predecessor firm, told The Texas Lawbook that he considers Fielding a good friend and wished him well, acknowledging that losing lawyers from time to time was just part of the business.
“We don’t usually lose people to other firms, but we lost one this time; it’s just the way it is,” he said.
It’s not the first time for Kirkland to score a lawyer from one of Texas’ top litigation boutiques; Anna Rotman, who leads Kirkland’s litigation practice in Houston, joined in 2016 from Yetter Coleman. Yetter Coleman associate Nicolas Thompson also joined Kirkland’s Houston office as a partner in 2014, the year the firm opened its office in the Bayou City. And in 2017, AZA associate Jamie Aycock joined Kirkland’s Houston office as a partner.
Rotman told The Texas Lawbook in July that the new contingency fee initiative “will align very well” with the industries the firm has focused on in Texas — namely energy and infrastructure — including commercial claims involving contract disputes among joint venture partners and disputes.
That seems to be Fielding’s bread and butter. He was an integral member of the trial team that scored a $535 million judgment for Energy Transfer Partners after a Dallas jury found in 2014 that Enterprise Products Partners had breached a joint venture agreement with ETP. Energy Transfer’s fee arrangement for that case is unknown, but the type of dispute fits.
In a non-energy case, Fielding filed a lawsuit last year on behalf of travel agency TravelPass Group against eight major hotel chains, alleging that they monopolized an avenue of the online booking hotel process and hurt consumers in the process.
A 2003 Harvard Law School graduate, Fielding also fits the Kirkland demographic: early forties or younger and at the prime of his career — which is in line with many of the firm’s clients, particularly private equity.
“The folks that are in the trenches of the field with us every day are the same age,” Andy Calder, a member of Kirkland’s global management committee who launched the firm’s Houston office, told The Texas Lawbook in a previous interview.
Considered one of the most profitable and powerful law firms on the globe, Kirkland made waves when it opened in Dallas last July with nine elite corporate transactional lawyers from Jones Day, Vinson & Elkins, Winston & Strawn and Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
In July, the firm announced that it has opted for its permanent office space to be as the anchor tenant of a new building in the Knox area of uptown Dallas. Meanwhile, most law firms are flocking to other parts of uptown or the Dallas Arts District.
Speculation mounted among the legal community as to whether Kirkland would launch a litigation practice in Dallas as other large national firms arrived in droves to poach the city’s top litigators. It remains to be seen whether more litigators are on the way.