Houston is a contender with a deep rotation, while Dallas is built around a single superstar. Houston’s numbers are what you’d expect from a stacked roster: lots of folks logging minutes, each responsible for their part in a couple of big wins and keeping the scoreboard lit up even when a star is off the floor.
By contrast, Dallas reads like a smaller lineup designed around a franchise player with a high-usage rate. The rest of the cast gets meaningful touches, but the offense clearly flows through him. Without that one star, Houston’s deeper squad would run away from their rival.
No, we’re not talking about the NBA, but rather M&A. Billion-dollar-plus deals, to be precise. The state’s largest cities are locked in their classic M&A arms race and the lawyers in the two cities are playing a different game in the first half of 2026.
Earlier this week, The Texas Lawbook kicked off its 1H 2026 rankings with a look at billion‑plus M&A, highlighting the firms that have already seized an early lead in the first six months of the year. Today, we take a deeper look at the lawyer‑level data, which shows the individual lawyers elbowing for position in the billion‑plus arena.
Viewed through that Texas rivalry lens, the Corporate Deal Tracker’s Texas‑led deal‑count leaderboard is a tale of two cities. Houston wins decisively on volume, fielding a broad roster across multiple firms, which gives it a deep bench of lawyers consistently doing megadeals. Dallas, by contrast, has fewer names in the Texas‑led top rankings, as its presence is far more top‑heavy: one lawyer, Gibson Dunn’s Robert Little (right), sits at the top of the chart with four deals, while a handful of lawyers at other firms add a few more deals.
When you flip to the value lens, for Texas-led, Little sits at the top with $328.5 billion, a gap so large that it effectively creates a separate tier just for him. The next cluster is made up almost entirely of Houston dealmakers handling single megadeals: Kirkland’s Andy Calder and Zach Savrick at $66.8 billion each from co-leading the NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy deal, followed by a group at $58 billion (Gibson’s Hillary Holmes and Tull Florey, along with Steve Gill and Mingda Zhao from Skadden) that sat across the table for the Houston energy giant tie-up of Devon and Coterra.
Once you move past that top band, the values taper but still reflect significant single transactions spread across multiple firms and cities. John Pitts’ three deals at $41.25 billion and Michael Marek’s single $35 billion deal keep Kirkland very visible, while mid‑tier values in the $7.5 billion to nearly $15 billion range bring in dealmakers from Latham & Watkins, Simpson Thacher, A&O Shearman, Akin, Vinson & Elkins, DLA Piper and others.
The Texas‑related value rankings reinforce that dynamic while pulling more firms into the picture. Houston posts a massive total driven by multiple single megadeals, spread across Kirkland, Latham, Skadden, V&E, Hunton AK, Baker Botts and others. Dallas still holds its own here, but its overall tally is dominated by Little’s $328.5 billion (thanks, SpaceX!) in Texas‑related deal value, supplemented by a handful of deals from partners at Kirkland, A&O Shearman and Akin. Without that single monster book of business, Houston’s broader bench of firms and deal sizes would leave Dallas in the billion-dollar dust.
The raw numbers only tell part of the story, though. A handful of marquee transactions illustrate just how central Texas lawyers have become to megadeals and why these rankings matter beyond bragging rights. Gibson Dunn’s Dallas‑ and Houston‑based teams, for example, advised on Elon Musk’s tie‑up of SpaceX and xAI and his separate $60 billion all‑stock acquisition of AI platform Cursor just a few weeks later.
Taken together, the firm‑level and city‑level views paint a richer picture of the Houston–Dallas rivalry in billion‑plus M&A. Kirkland, Latham and Gibson Dunn may be racking up the biggest cumulative totals, but the Texas‑led and Texas‑related leaderboards show Skadden, V&E, Hunton AK and Baker Botts are all carving out meaningful slices of the megadeal market.
