Victoria Salem left her liquified natural gas law practice at Latham & Watkins in London in June 2015 to join the corporate legal department at Occidental Petroleum handling major transactions.
Today, Salem joins a growing number of in-house lawyers rejoining law firms by becoming the newest partner in the Houston office of the Magic Circle firm Clifford Chance.
“It’s a great time to switch back to practice at a firm,” Salem told The Texas Lawbook in an interview. “It is an opportunity to work with a range of clients [and] work on some international projects.”
After spending more than four years at Oxy, Salem joined Cheniere Energy in 2019, where she served as assistant general counsel. She led several energy and infrastructure projects and transactions with a combined price tag of more than $20 billion during her time at the two Houston-based energy companies.
“I’ve had a front-row seat to all the developments in the LNG market,” she said.
Salem said she chose to join Clifford Chance’s global financial markets team because several of her former Latham colleagues are now with the group and because the “breadth of the team is truly special.”
“Victoria’s unique perspective from her in-house role, combined with her private practice experience in various types of financing for domestic and international energy, resource and infrastructure projects, including project finance and capital markets, aligns well with the hybrid approach to financing and refinancing all types of projects and companies across the energy and infrastructure sector,” said Emma Matebalavu, who leads the firm’s global financial markets practice.
Headquartered in London, Clifford Chance has 3,835 fee earners in 32 offices in 22 countries. The firm reported annual revenues of £2.3 billion, or $2.7 billion, last year. In June 2023, The Texas Lawbook broke the news that Clifford Chance was opening a Houston office, which now has about 40 attorneys. The firm now has 440 lawyers in its three U.S. offices.