Enterprise Products Names Hap Weitzel as GC

© 2016 The Texas Lawbook.

By Mark Curriden

(April 26) – Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners has named Harry “Hap” Weitzel as its next general counsel and corporate secretary, according to the company’s website.

Enterprise, which is one of the largest oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S., also named Craig Murray, who served as the company’s GC for the past 15 months, as its new vice president of regulatory affairs.

Weitzel is a former commercial litigator hired by Enterprise in January 2015 to serve as the company’s deputy general counsel. A 1987 graduate of Texas Christian University, Weitzel is “responsible for all legal functions, including securities, litigation, employment, mergers and acquisitions, and commercial transactions,” Enterprise states in his official biography.

Weitzel, who received his law degree from Harvard in 1990, has been a partner at several prestigious law firms, including Pepper Hamilton, Mayer Brown and Beck Redden.

While Weitzel has been GC for only two weeks, he journeyed to Dallas last week to watch his outside legal team present oral arguments to the Dallas Court of Appeals in Enterprise’s litigation against competitor Energy Transfer Partners.

“Good job. It went well,” Weitzel told former Texas appellate judge David Keltner, who argued the case for Enterprise.

Enterprise is appealing a 2014 jury verdict that ruled that it had legally formed a business partnership with ETP to jointly build a pipeline from Cushing, Okla. to Houston, even though Enterprise says it never formally agreed to form a partnership and doesn’t want to do a deal with ETP.

Murray, a former long-time partner at Vinson & Elkins in Houston, has been a long-time legal counselor for Enterprise executives for many years, according to lawyers familiar with Enterprise’s legal operations. They say Enterprise hired Murray in January 2015 when former GC Stephanie Hildebrandt departed to be a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright.

Murray “is responsible for all regulatory functions of the Company, including activities involving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),” according to the company’s website.

A former captain in the U.S. Marine Corp., Murray is widely respected as one of the premier corporate finance lawyers in the energy sector.

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