Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
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.
Adam Shulman lives by two lessons from his father: anything becomes interesting when examined closely, and mastery begins with the willingness to be terrible.
As vice president of corporate global strategy and development at Dallas-based Celanese, Shulman applies both principles daily. Celanese is a global leader in producing specialized chemicals and engineered materials essential to countless industries, from cellulose acetate used in glasses and packaging to high-performance polymers found in solar panels and orthopedic implants.
This appreciation for complexity and disciplined curiosity helped earn Shulman recognition from The Texas Lawbook and the DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel as a finalist for the 2025 M&A Transaction of the Year.
Mitsubishi Corp. said Friday that it has entered the U.S. shale gas business with the acquisition of specific assets from Dallas-based private investment firm Aethon Energy Management for about $7.5 billion. Latham & Watkins advised Aethon and Vinson & Elkins represented Mitsubishi.
Houston energy infrastructure company Talen Energy said Thursday that it has acquired two power generating plants in the PJM market from New Jersey-based investment firm Energy Capital Partners for $2.55 billion cash and about $900 million in stock. Talen General Counsel John Wander worked with Kirkland & Ellis and White & Case on the deal.
Only two women Texas deal lawyers led billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions in 2016. That same year, five Texas lawyers for Kirkland & Ellis were among the 43 attorneys who were the lead legal advisors on transactions that topped $1 billion and only one Kirkland partner ranked among The Texas Lawbook's Corporate Deal Tracker's Top 10 Texas dealmakers. What a difference a decade has made. New Corporate Deal Tracker data shows that, in 2025, 135 lawyers in Texas led or co-led billion-dollar deals for buyers, sellers or targets and the top three are women partners. And Kirkland's representation in the CDT billion-dollar lawyer rankings have skyrocketed, too.
The Texas lawyers at four law firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Vinson & Elkins, Latham & Watkins and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher — were the lead legal advisors in the majority of mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and divestitures valued at $1 billion or more last year.
In fact, attorneys in the Texas offices at those four large corporate law firms were lead counsel for the transactions principals — buyers, sellers or targets — in 67 of the 93 M&A deals in 2025 that had a value of $1 billion or more, according to new data from The Texas Lawbook’s Corporate Deal Tracker.
When Johnny Carson used to parody astronomer Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show, he’d stretch out the words “billions and billions” to accentuate the astronomer’s Mid-Atlantic delivery. The line became so famous that many people assumed Sagan said it.
He never did.
Yet Sagan, with some humor about it, leaned into the myth, even later calling one of his books Billions & Billions as a nod to Carson’s cosmic exaggeration.
Now we have to borrow the phrase again. Not to describe galaxies or particles of star stuff, but to capture the sheer scale of billion-dollar-plus deals handled by Texas lawyers last year.
Vistra Corp. said Monday that it acquired Cogentrix Energy for about $2.3 billion cash, about $925 million in common shares and the assumption of $1.5 billion of debt. Vistra used Latham & Watkins, Sidley Austin and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as outside legal counsel. King & Spalding advised Cogentrix.
The undisputed dealmaker of the year 2025 was artificial intelligence.
Its needs, whether for infrastructure, software, data, cooling, tubing for cooling, electrical parts, real estate or any other basic or specialized situation, seemed to play a role, directly or indirectly, in nearly every deal reported to The Texas Lawbook this year.
Allen Pusey and Jason Philyaw sifted through the more than 1,200 M&A transactions that have passed across our desks over the last 12 months to pick the most significant deals from last year.
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