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Firm Management

Latham’s Gamechanging 15 Years in Texas: How The Firm’s Houston Office Wrote the Playbook for National Firms to Storm the State

The Houston office of Latham & Watkins had not been open for a year when Ryan Maierson experienced a significant realization. The office opened in February 2010, and as the year progressed, he and the other partners at Baker Botts began to marvel at how easily this “non-native” firm from Los Angeles integrated itself into Texas’s established transactional law environment.

Other national firms had previously entered the Texas market. However, with Latham — the second most profitable law firm in the world — something felt different. In less than a year, Latham had achieved what no other national firm had managed to do: it instilled a sense of fear in the long-established Texas firms that had previously dominated corporate law in the Lone Star State.

Fifteen years later, this is the story of how Latham changed the game in Texas.

Citi — Big Law in Texas Had Strong 2024, and 2025 Looks Even Better

The bad news for Texas-based corporate law firms is that revenues, profits per partner and demand for legal services significantly trailed their out-of-state competitors during 2024, according to new Citi Law Firm Group data provided Monday to The Texas Lawbook. But the good news is that those outside national law firms — including Kirkland & Ellis, Gibson Dunn, Latham & Watkins and Sidley — growing faster and richer now make up about 60 percent of the Texas corporate legal market, according to the Texas Lawbook 50 report for 2024.

Are You a Go-Getter Lawyer?

To be a success in the legal profession hinges much more on how you work than where you work. Taking ownership of your own success and not expecting someone else to provide it for you is every bit as important today as it was 40 years ago. But what the series revealed is that different generations have a different sense of what go-getting looks like today.

Special Edition of P.S. — Remembering Kirkland’s Olivia Clarke and ‘Humor Beats Cancer’

The world of corporate law lost someone special last week. Olivia Clarke was not a lawyer. She was not a judge. She was not a general counsel. Olivia was the communications director at Kirkland & Ellis. She also was a former reporter and editor at the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. She knew her lawyers and firm and she equally knew our work and business. She was a strong advocate for her colleagues at the world’s largest corporate law firm, but lawyers inside Kirkland say she was equally an advocate pushing them to be open with journalists.

After a decade-long battle with cancer, Olivia died last week. She was only 46. “Olivia was incredibly capable and unfailingly thoughtful,” Texas Lawbook senior editor Allen Pusey said Monday.

Fort Worth Boutique Firms Merge

Vartabedian Hester & Haynes and Forshey Prostok are ringing in the new year by adding expanded services for their clients through the combination.

Baker McKenzie, Eversheds and Reed Smith Promote New Partners

The parade of firms announcing their 2024-25 partnership class continued Thursday. Two global corporate law firms — Baker McKenzie and Reed Smith — each announced that three of their younger Texas lawyers had been elected to their partnerships, while Eversheds Sutherland promoted one.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the number of new Texas partners announced by Baker McKenzie, as well as a promotion that wasn’t to its partnership class. The Lawbook regrets the error.

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