Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Privately held Seattle freight transportation, marine service and energy distribution conglomerate Saltchuk said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Houston-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. for about $1.2 billion cash. Sidley Austin advised Great Lakes and its CLO Vivienne Schiffer, while Fried Frank represented Saltchuk.
Under the deal, Clear Channel, the world's largest out-of-home advertising company would stay in San Antonio, led by former TelevisaUnivision CEO Wade Davis. Kirkland and Freshfields advised.
Transocean announced Monday it has acquired Valaris Ltd. for about $5.8 billion in an all-stock transaction that creates an offshore drilling behemoth with 33 ultra-deepwater drillships, nine semisubmersibles and 31 modern jackups. Skadden advised Valaris with a team led by Eric Otness in Houston and Stephen Arcano and Max Troper in New York. Davor Vukadin is GC at Valaris, and Brady Long is Transocean's chief legal officer.
DLA Piper and A&O Shearman advised on the deal whose announcement triggered a run-up on Nasdaq for Silicon Labs stock.
Texas-based SpaceX has acquired xAI to scale their combined operations “to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars” in a record-setting transaction. In what would be the largest merger of all time, the deal was co-led by a Dallas lawyer from Gibson Dunn.
Paul Weiss announced Tuesday that it has found the lawyers needed to open and run a new office in Houston, both from Kirkland & Ellis.
Skadden and Gibson Dunn advised the two companies on the merger, which would create one of the largest shale oil producers in the Delaware Basin. The Texas Lawbook's Jason Philyaw has the details.
Fifth Third Bank's merger with Dallas-based Comerica was a complex mega-transaction put extraordinary pressure on the Comerica legal department, which was already being pushed to the limit on other matters. But the $10.9 billion transaction announced on Oct. 6 officially closed this morning at 12:02 a.m., a mere four months after the deal was announced. Citing their extraordinary accomplishments, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook this past Thursday night honored the Comerica legal department and its outside counsel at Wachtell Lipton with the 2025 DFW M&A Transaction of the Year.
Latham and White & Case advised on the deal which includes a federal government stake in the publicly traded magnet manufacturer. USA Rare Earth operates a Rare Earth minerals mining facility in Hudspeth County in West Texas.
As a teenager and college student, Chris Blevins watched his father — an accountant turned business entrepreneur — negotiate contracts, do deals with vendors and handle issues with clients and customers.
“I was taking a few business and law-related classes, and I started realizing that the things that frustrated him weren’t about the product or the customers, they were about navigating legal and contractual issues that felt foreign and risky,” Blevins said. “It clicked for me that I could be someone who helped businesses run better by removing the friction and risk around these issues, making things clearer and easier.”
For Blevins, the career strategy paid major dividends in 2025 when he scored some huge successes for Grapevine-based Solo Brands. As such, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook have named Blevins as a finalist for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department (two to five attorneys).
Veteran corporate lawyers and dealmakers Wilson Chu and Joanna Lin have left McDermott to launch Dechert’s new Dallas office, following their high-profile work advising Tesla on Elon Musk’s $1 trillion employment contract. Their move was quietly noted in Dechert’s announcement of 20 partner hires for new offices in Dallas and Chicago, and existing ones in key U.S. markets, marking another shift amid McDermott’s ongoing post-merger reshuffling.
Artificial intelligence as a service is transforming business operations across industries, but its tax treatment remains inconsistent among states. For example, Texas applies sales tax to many AIaaS offerings under its “data processing” framework by taxing 80 percent of the service charge, while Indiana exempts AIaaS entirely as a nontaxable service. These differences have significant implications for deal structuring, compliance risk and valuation in private equity transactions. This article examines Texas’ controversial stance, contrasts it with Indiana’s approach and explains why these distinctions matter for investors and operators.
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