A seven-person federal jury in Wilmington heard four days of testimony, deliberated for two hours and then unanimously found that a group of refined-coal plant operators affiliated with CERT Operations “willfully” violated the patented mercury-reducing technology of Corsicana-headquartered Midwest Energy Emissions Corp.
Employee Spotlight: Krista Torralva
The Texas Lawbook is pleased to announce that former Dallas Morning News courts reporter Krista Torralva has joined The Lawbook team to work with Michelle Casady and Janet Elliott to cover complex commercial litigation being handled by Texas lawyers.
SEC: Houston Man Illegally Used Wife’s Insider Info for $1.76M in Profits
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the last name of the man accused of insider trading. The Lawbook regrets the error.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed federal insider trading charges Thursday accusing a Houston man with using information he obtained from his wife, who worked in the M&A division at BP, to illegally profit from the British-based oil conglomerate’s $1.3 billion acquisition of TravelCenters of America one year ago.
Paul Hastings Lands CapM Trio from Akin
A dozen years after first opening an office in Houston, Paul Hastings is making a concerted effort to expand its presence in Texas. The 1,100-lawyer corporate firm announced Monday three new capital markets partners — David Elder, Christopher Centrich and Patrick Hurley — have joined its Houston outpost from Akin Gump. The addition of the trio of lawyers comes six months after Paul Hastings hired complex commercial litigator Paul Genender away from Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
Match CLO Jared Sine ‘Taking on More of a Strategy Role’ at GoDaddy
For eight years, Jared Sine has navigated multibillion-dollar M&A deals and bet-the-company litigation at Match Group. On Friday, Sine announced that he is leaving the dating app tech company on March 11 to become the chief legal and chief strategy officer with GoDaddy, a $15 billion web hosting corporation, starting March 18. Sine’s deputy at Match, associate general counsel Jeanette Teckman, will step in as acting chief legal officer.
“At the end of the day, eight years is a long time to be at any one place,” Sine told The Texas Lawbook in an interview Friday. “We’ve built a great team — a phenomenal team that I would be hesitant to challenge if I was an opponent. It’s been a fun ride to be part of the growth at Match.”
Three Lawyers, Six Texas Justices Take Center Stage in Winter Storm Uri’s Biggest Case
Six Texas Supreme Court justices peppered three lawyers with about two-dozen questions during an hour of oral argument Tuesday morning in an effort to determine whether the state’s Public Utility Commission was within its power to manually set electric rates at $9,000 per megawatt-hour during the four days of Winter Storm Uri in 2021 or if a massive, multibillion-dollar repricing needs to take place.
“The question before this court is a narrow, legal one: Does the plain text of PURA authorize the PUC to order ERCOT to restore competitive scarcity pricing signals to the electricity market and ensure the reliability of the electric grid?” Macey Reasoner Stokes, an appellate partner at Baker Botts in Houston who represents Calpine and Talen Energy, told the state’s highest court. “We submit the answer is a resounding yes.” Lawyers for Luminant disagreed. The Texas Lawbook has the details.
Multibillion-dollar Winter Storm Uri Showdown at the Texas Supreme Court
More than a dozen of the largest electric power companies operating in Texas will face off with their state regulator Tuesday at the Texas Supreme Court. At stake are billions of dollars paid and received under emergency circumstances during Winter Storm Uri three years ago. The energy companies, led by Dallas-based Luminant and Houston-headquartered Pattern Energy, claim that the Texas Public Utility Commission illegally and unnecessarily increased the rates to buy and sell electricity for the four days that unprecedented cold temperatures and freezing rain engulfed the state in February 2021 — rate increases that caused some companies to lose billions of dollars while providing other energy companies billions of dollars in sudden profits.
Matt Orwig Says Goodbye to the Billable Hour
After 17 years with the U.S. Department of Justice and 20 years as a trial lawyer and white-collar criminal defense lawyer with some of the largest corporate law firms in the world, Matt Orwig officially retires from the law practice Monday. From federal judges to corporate general counsel, lawyers tell The Texas Lawbook the impact Orwig had on their career.
“In addition to being a skilled advocate, he was a wonderful teacher, mentor, and colleague who always made time to answer my questions and to strategize about cases,” Judge Irma Ramirez, who was recently confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, said. “Matt is a genuinely kind person who cares about everyone around him, and he is the kind of friend on whom you can always count.”
ACC-DFW and The Texas Lawbook Celebrate In-House Corporate Counsel Award Winners
Nearly 250 prominent general counsel, senior corporate counsel and partners at Texas law firms gathered Thursday night at the George W. Bush Institute to celebrate the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards, which recognizes extraordinary work and success of in-house counsel during the past year. Co-hosted by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook, 15 corporate in-house legal departments were honored and 12 were presented with awards. More than half of the finalists were women and more than one-fourth were ethnic minorities — all demonstrated incredible achievements during 2023. The DFW Corporate Counsel Awards is the signature event in the partnership between ACC-DFW and The Texas Lawbook. The two organizations also co-host CLEs throughout the year. Three of the dozen award categories were contested. In each of the three categories, all of the finalists were qualified to win. But, of course, only one could. This story includes the details and lots of photos from the event.
Pioneer’s Akshar Patel Counseling the Board on the Biggest M&A Deal of 2023
Akshar Patel has always been a prodigy, graduating summa cum laude at 19 and law school at 21, where he was an editor at SMU Dedman School of Law’s International Law Journal. He had four years of corporate law practice on his resume and was associate general counsel at Flowserve Corporation at 26. Now a ripe old 38, Patel is the corporate secretary and vice president of legal at Pioneer Natural Resources, where he played a critical role in the October 2023 $64.5 billion acquisition of Pioneer by Exxon Mobil.
“He played an instrumental role in orchestrating the largest deal signed in the entire world in 2023,” said Gibson Dunn partner Jeff Chapman. “To quote the great sage Adam Sandler, ‘Not too shabby.’”
Citing his extraordinary work on the Exxon Mobil deal, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Patel with the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Corporate Secretary/Legal Counselor of the Year.