Barnes & Thornburg has expanded its Dallas office by hiring Jeff Connor as counsel, the firm announced.
With a year of in-house experience at private equity advisory firm Strait Capital, Connor joins Barnes & Thornburg after four years as an investment management associate at the Dallas office of Morgan Lewis. Connor has experience advising fund sponsors, institutional investors, as well as PE and hedge fund clients on formation, structuring and transactions.
Prior to that, Connor was an investment funds associate at Akin for a couple of years and had previously worked as a senior investment management attorney at Kilpatrick for nearly a year. He was Strait Capital’s chief compliance officer and vice president of legal & compliance from March 2017 to April 2018.
“Jeff’s investment management experience and business perspective will be a real asset to our Dallas clients,” said Thomas Haskins, managing partner of the Dallas office.
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The largest law firm in Indiana, Barnes & Thornburg was formed in 1982, when two notable Hoosier entities merged: Barnes, Hickam, Pantzer & Boyd in Indianapolis and South Bend-based Thornburg, McGill, Deahl, Harman, Carey & Murray, which accounts for the heavy Midwest presence of Barnes & Thornburg’s 23-office footprint nationwide.
The firm expanded into Texas by opening its Dallas office in June 2015 with two founding lawyers from what was then-Gardere Wynne Sewell: Mark Bayer, who retired from Barnes & Thornburg, and Randy Gordon, who’s now the managing partner for the Dallas-Fort Worth offices of Duane Morris.
Barnes & Thornburg has 19 partners and 11 associates in its Dallas office and recently hired veteran Louisiana litigator Kelly Brilleaux as a partner in May.
AREAS OF FOCUS
Connor focuses on private equity and hedge funds, institutional investments, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, secondary transactions and private credit matters.
EDUCATION
Undergraduate: Texas Tech University (BA, 2011)
Law School: Southern Methodist University (JD, 2014)