Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A former federal prosecutor in Dallas, Judge Ramirez has served as a federal magistrate in the Northern District of Texas since 2002. In 2016, she was nominated to a NDTX judgeship with the support of both Texas senators, but never received a vote by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, who served as chief judge of the Northern District of Texas from 2016 to 2022, has informed President Joe Biden that she is taking senior status effective May 15.
Judge Lynn, who was nominated to the federal bench in 1999 by President Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a voice vote, told The Texas Lawbook that she has no plans to reduce her caseload but is “simply making room for another appointment for our court.”
Citing three decades of service to the Houston legal community, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announced Wednesday that Aiman will be the recipient of the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“I wanted to be a lawyer for as long as I can recall,” Aiman said in an interview. “From very early on I respected the importance of the rule of law and how it can make lives better. I understood that lawyers have influence and can bring change and can make things happen. I was, and I’m still, fascinated by how the law touches so much of our lives.”
For half of a century, the Big Three dominated Big Law in Texas like GM, Ford and Chrysler ruled Detroit. Every Texas law school graduate wanted to work at Baker Botts, Fulbright & Jaworski or Vinson & Elkins. Rookie lawyers hired by the Big Three retired there. Two-dozen years ago, the Big Three had roughly the same number of lawyers and nearly identical revenues in their home state. Each faced monumental headwinds and threats to their very existence. The Big Three survived, though they look a lot differently today than they did in 1998. Baker Botts, Norton Rose Fulbright and V&E remain among the Texas Lawbook 50's top five largest law firms, though the gap between them in revenues and profits is widening.
When trial lawyer Steve Susman died unexpectedly in 2020, legal industry insiders wondered what would become of the firm he founded four decades ago. The verdict is in.
“We had a record year in revenues and profits in 2022,” Susman Godfrey co-managing partner Vineet Bhatia told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview. “2022 was far and away our best year ever.”
Susman Godfrey does not release annual law firm financials. An analysis by The Texas Lawbook shows, however, that the firm has nearly 200 lawyers – 105 of them in Texas – and ranks in the top five in RPL and PEP. The Lawbook has the exclusive details.
As corporate mergers, acquisitions and capital market practices have slowed in Texas the past few months, the focus on business bankruptcies and restructurings has returned. And the Texas offices of Sidley Austin have made one of the first big lateral moves. Rakhee Patel confirmed Tuesday that she has left Winstead after seven years as a shareholder and joined Sidley this week as a partner in the firm’s Dallas office. The timing could not be better for Sidley.
As a CIA intelligence officer focusing on Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lynne Puckett “got a ringside seat to the dissolution of Eastern Europe as communist-controlled in 1989. It was also when she realized she wanted to go to law school.
Three decades later, Puckett is the general counsel of Celanese Corporation, an Irving-based global chemical and specialty materials company with a market cap of $12 billion. In November 2022, Puckett and her legal team closed an $11 billion acquisition of a majority ownership in DuPont’s mobility and materials business.
Citing the deal’s extraordinary complexity, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named Puckett, her in-house legal team at Celanese and outside counsel at Baker Botts as the recipient of the 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year.
The Lawbook visited with the 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel M&A Transaction of the Year Award winner about what she looks for in outside counsel, hourly rates, pro bono and diversity.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas claims that a decision issued 11 days ago by a Texas appeals court declaring that the emergency pricing orders issued by the agency in 2021 during Winter Storm Uri were unlawful needs to be immediately reversed because it “has thrown Texas’s electricity and associated markets into confusion.”
Lawyers for the PUC filed an official petition for review with the Texas Supreme Court on Friday arguing that the Third Court of Appeals in Austin “had no jurisdiction to validate or invalidate already-expired orders.”
When Range Resources long-time GC David Poole retired 10 days ago, the board named his handpicked successor Erin McDowell to fill his role. In an exclusive interview with The Texas Lawbook, McDowell discusses the factors that impacted her career, the path she took to become a chief legal officer of a $6 billion natural gas company and the challenges she and Range face.
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