David Houck had no interest in the oil and gas industry when he became a lawyer 42 years ago.
His first job out of law school was working for legendary Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade as a prosecutor putting deadbeat dads behind on their child support payments in jail.
Four decades later, Houck is the dean of the energy bar. He was in the inaugural class of Texas lawyers to receive board certification in oil, gas and mineral law. He’s been involved in transformational domestic and international mergers, acquisitions and financings. He’s been the corporate representative in lawsuits in which hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.
He’s provided critical legal oversight of billions of dollars of offshore assets in the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, he’s showed scores of women and men what it means to be a lawyer.
“I’m looking at the end of the tunnel for my career,” Houck, who is assistant general counsel of Total E&P USA, told The Texas Lawbook. “The practice of law has changed significantly – it’s a lot more complicated. You need to be a specialist at everything.
“I’m a believer in being a lifetime learner,” Houck said. “I’m always curious about new things; and that goes especially with my work.”
Citing that thirst for knowledge and Houck’s mastery of oil and gas law, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to honor Houck with its 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award.
“David’s 40 years – more than 30 years with Total – of legal expertise have given him a view of some of the most interesting, sophisticated transactions at the highest level of legal practice,” Total Petrochemicals & Refining General Counsel Elizabeth Matthews told The Texas Lawbook.
“An award recognizing David’s lifetime of achievements would memorialize what those of us who work with him already know to be true: that David’s career has been a tribute to the value of courtesy in his craft and a testament to the first-rate practice of law,” Matthews said.
Nikita Taldykin, Total’s vice president and general counsel of Upstream and Corporate Services, who nominated Houck for the award, said, Houck “has been a cornerstone of legal excellence, consistently well-regarded in Houston and throughout Texas for the quality of his legal judgment and the effortless generosity of his spirit.”
Houck was born in Dallas about a mile from NorthPark Mall, which opened when he was 12. His father was a claims adjuster and later the vice president of an insurance company. Both of his grandfathers were lawyers.
“I wanted a graduate degree and law seemed a natural fit,” he said. “So, I was carrying on a family tradition.”
Houck went to college and law school at the University of Texas in Austin.
Upon graduation and passing the bar examination in 1977, he interviewed with Dallas DA Henry Wade, who told Houck he would never hire someone with an IQ higher than his own.
“My first job was putting guys in jail for not paying child support,” he said. “Not the most glamorous work, but back then such matters were assigned to the district courts on rotation. So, I got to know the courthouse, the district clerk’s office and a variety of judges and their clerks on a personal basis. And I got a glimpse of an intractable problem.”
After nearly three years in the district attorney’s office, Houck went into private practice – first as an associate doing oil and gas title work at a small Dallas law firm called Brown & Walker and later as a partner at Walker, Houck & Helms.
“Doing title work gives you a great education into many aspects of oil and gas law,” he said.
At the end of 1985, the oil business for lawyers was slow and he learned that there was an in-house legal position open at Dallas-based Enserch Exploration handling contracts. He applied.
“I was offered the job and given the choice of starting mid-January or the first week of February. I chose January,” Houck said. “Two things happened during those first two weeks. The Challenger Space Shuttle blew up – one of those, you ‘remember where you were’ moments – and the price of oil crashed to around $12.
“I thought, ‘last hired, first fired,’ and we did have layoffs about six weeks later. But the lawyers were retained to sell properties. It was a chilly winter and I had a small office with a Steelcase desk, a radiator and a window overlooking the First Presbyterian Church soup kitchen. I felt very thankful to be where I was.”
In 1987, Fina Oil and Chemical Co. came calling. Fina wanted to acquire properties and assets and needed M&A work done.
“Two weeks after I started, I was on a plane to Louisiana to buy an exploration company,” he said.
For 13 years, Houck was the lawyer responsible for Fina’s upstream oil and gas assets in Texas and Louisiana. He played a crucial role in the company’s $600 million purchase of Tenneco Oil Company’s Gulf Coast and southwestern divisions in 1988.
“That summer we began visiting a number of data rooms to look over the oil and gas assets to be sold. The company was broken into pieces and sold to Chevron, Mobil, Amoco, Conoco, Mesa and others,” he said. “The Tenneco sale was considered the then-largest one- time corporate divestiture in history. It took a lot of time and energy to digest that deal.”
When Total acquired Fina in 2000 for $13 billion, Houck was part of the deal and agreed to stay with the new global energy giant and moved to Houston.
In the 18 years since, Houck has been “instrumental in nearly every category of upstream oil and gas transactions, from acquisitions and financing to discovery and production, and in a wide variety of domestic and international jurisdictions,” Taldykin wrote in his nomination of Houck.
Houck spent five years (2003-2008) working at Total’s headquarters in Paris.
“We learned to speak some French,” he said. “On balance it was a great experience, and for our kids, life-changing. However, I was glad to finally come back to Houston. My official first day back turned out to be the Monday after Hurricane Ike, so things got delayed a little.”
In Paris, Houck worked on some huge transactions, including the Akpo offshore pipeline project in Nigeria, gas contracts and production-sharing contracts regarding offshore production from Trinidad, and oil sands/bitumen and upgrader projects in Alberta, Canada.
“All of these involved travelling to the countries and, in the case of Canada, travelling to Tokyo to negotiate with a future partner,” he said. “It’s been interesting.”
In 2010, Houck played a key role in Total’s acquisition of a major stake in the Barnett shale play surrounding Fort Worth.
“Total had previously sold out of its onshore position and with the Barnett acquisition returned to the onshore arena,” he said. “Unfortunately, shale development in the U.S. brought so much gas to market that prices fell below the level expected which hurt our economics. However, this is a typical pattern in the U.S. oil business.”
Matthews said that Houck’s “most enduring contribution has been the consistent presence of his legal judgment. His instincts are unfailingly accurate, and his guidance is reliably sound.”
David Sweeney, a partner at Akin Gump who has worked with Houck on several major matters, was impressed by “how much fun it is to work with David.”
“Most attorneys with David’s level of qualifications would not be as approachable and as willing to let their outside service providers bounce ideas off of them or just call to discuss a topic before advising on it,” Sweeney said. “I don’t think I have dealt with an attorney who is as good at listening when it’s time to listen and talking when it’s time to talk.”
Sweeney and other lawyers who worked with Houck say he has been well-served by his interest in the finer points of legal issues and his facility for recall.
“Over the years, his fellow attorneys – in-house and external counsel alike – have learned that alarm and anxiety are the appropriate responses when David notes that he’s ‘just asking questions.’ ”
“Combined with the fact that seemingly no one in living memory can recall a time when David misconstrued a fact or misremembered a detail, his inquisitiveness might be menacing to his colleagues if it were not otherwise tempered by his gentle manners,” Taldykin wrote in her nomination letter.
Houck said much has changed about the practice of law over his career of four-decades.
“When I first went to work at Fina in 1987, we circulated carbon copies of memos to know who was working on what,” he said. “We kept had a paper file room with a card catalog. Over the years we have transitioned to email and have moved from WordPerfect to MS Word and PDFs.”
Houck said he enjoys working with some law firms, but not others.
“Responsiveness is key,” he said. “I look for someone who gets back to me quickly. Often management needs an answer on an important topic where we have to be right. Outside counsel is a backstop to the advice we give in-house. We look for someone who returns calls without delay.”
Matthews, Total’s general counsel, said Houck is a rock of information and leadership in the company’s legal department.
“David Houck has never done anything halfway, and the care and skill he exhibits as an attorney remind us that, at its best, law can be a craft and a practice to be honed,” Matthews said. “David is a meticulous attorney with careful eye for detail. His advice is thoughtful, and always practical. He sets an abiding example for us all to admire.”