Nickolas Lorentzatos faced 1,003 days of trials and tribulations and survived. The Oasis Petroleum general counsel had a tumultuous 33 months.
- The death of his father and mother within 15 months apart;
- The Covid-19 pandemic, which caused a chain of events involving employee safety measures and workplace changes involving business partners;
- The crash of oil prices, the evaporation of revenues and prices and multiple rounds of layoffs;
- Eighteen-hour workdays leading up to the decision to declare corporate bankruptcy;
- The exit from bankruptcy and implementation of the restructuring plan;
- A $510 million simplification agreement between Oasis Petroleum and Oasis Midstream Partners;
- The $745 million acquisition of Bakken Shale assets from Diamondback Energy and the $481 million sale of its Permian Shale assets to Percussion Petroleum;
- A $6.8 billion merger of Oasis Midstream Partners and Crestwood Equity Partners; and
- The still pending $6 billion merger of Oasis and Whiting Petroleum.
“So, not much sleep at all. Lots and lots of stress,” Lorentzatos told The Texas Lawbook. “This time period pushed everyone to their limits and beyond, but the Oasis team answered the call time and again. I have never seen anything like it before and probably never will again.
“It was absolutely humbling to be a part of this,” he said.
Citing the mountain of successes Lorentzatos – his friends and colleagues call him Niko – achieved in the face of extraordinary difficulties, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named the Oasis Petroleum top legal officer as the 2022 Houston General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
Premium Subscribers: Click Here for a Q&A with Niko Lorentzatos, where shares what he looks for in outside counsel and recalls career mentors. Plus, Lorentzatos performing with his college band Lost in the Supermarket.
“I’ve been working with public companies for 32 years, and I have never seen so much accomplished by so few and in such a short period of time,” said Vinson & Elkins partner Dave Oelman, who nominated Lorentzatos for the award. “Niko suffered the loss of both of his parents in relatively quick succession – his father, Fotios, in May of 2019 and his mother, Marina, in July of 2020. These losses, together with the stress and uncertainty we all felt with the emergence of Covid, plus the bankruptcy of a company he had helped build, would be too much for many, and certainly for me.”
“Not only is the completion of this many transactions incredible, you have to look extremely hard to find this kind of a success story with post-bankruptcy companies,” Oelman said. “None of this would have been possible without Niko’s leadership. Niko remained positive and steady throughout these ordeals – not only turning in stellar performance as a professional notwithstanding his personal difficulties – but also in being tirelessly supportive and empathetic to those around him.”
Lorentzatos admits it was a difficult period, but he said his belief in his company and the leadership at Oasis made it possible.
“I believe in providing abundant and reliable energy to power our lives,” he said. “There is so much discussion about the role of fossil fuels in our society today, and I am glad we are having that conversation. I believe we can provide the power our world needs while being good stewards.”
“I also believe that if we frame the conversation in terms of challenges and issues to be addressed or solved, we can harness the power of the problem-solvers in the oil and gas industry to meet those challenges,” he said.
Houston trial lawyer Rusty Hardin has worked with Lorentzatos on matters dating to his time at Burlington Resources.
“What impresses me most about Niko is his common sense and judgment,” Hardin said. “Niko is excellent at recognizing the problem and then making the best decisions based on the best interest of his client.”
“Being a former trial lawyer gives Niko the advantage and experience of being able to quickly size up a situation,” he said. “There are few GCs who can do that, few who have Niko’s judgment.”
The Oasis motto is “Be the Buffalo.”
“When a storm is coming, cattle will see the storm coming and head the other direction,” Lorentzatos said. “Buffalo, on the other hand, see the storm coming and charge it, and get through it. ‘Be the Buffalo’ has been our rallying cry for a few years now and really sums up the mentality.”
Colleagues say Lorentzatos is the buffalo.
Lorentzatos’ parents were both from the Greek island of Kefalonia. Most of his family still live in Greece.
His father was 14 years older than his mom and grew up during the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War II. After the war, an earthquake leveled Kefalonia.
“My dad, like many young men his age, left to become the Greek equivalent of a merchant marine,” he said. “He traveled the world and eventually ended up in New York City, working several waiter jobs. He didn’t like the cold weather and moved to Houston. Believe it or not, he liked the weather. There were several Kefalonians in Houston because of the Port of Houston, so he had some connections.”
In Houston, his father initially worked at a full-service gas station. Then he bought a gas station and then purchased several others. He built a few full-service car washes called Regency Car Wash.
Lorentzatos was born and raised in Houston. Except for his years in college, he has lived in Houston his entire life. Starting in junior high school, he spent weekends and summers vacuuming cars, pumping gas or selling polish wax and air freshener and other add-ons to customers.
He is the only lawyer in the family.
“I remember my parents telling me from a young age that I would be a lawyer because I liked to argue,” he said. “They weren’t wrong. Being a doctor was also mentioned, but I never really gravitated to science.”
Lorentzatos earned a political science degree from Washington and Lee University, then a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 1995. In 2000, he went to the University of Texas to get an M.B.A.
Bracewell hired Lorentzatos as part of its complex commercial-litigation practice.
“It was excellent experience,” he said. “Glenn Ballard in the trial section gave me courtroom experience my first year, and that continued for my four years there.”
At a CLE program in 1999, Lorentzatos talked with former Bracewell lawyer John Reagan Kott, who had earlier gone in-house at Burlington Resources.
“Reagan mentioned he was looking to hire someone around my vintage with my skill set,” he said. “The experience opened my eyes to a career I never anticipated or envisioned. This was 1999, and I remember lots of lawyers were leaving firms to go to dot coms. I recall thinking going to an E&P company was very old economy, but the business and the work sounded interesting to me, so I took the leap and never looked back.”
Lorentzatos spent eight years as senior counsel at Burlington, then three years at Targa Resources.
In 2010, the founders of Oasis Petroleum, Tommy Nusz and Taylor Reid, contacted Lorentzatos about joining their company.
“I met with Tommy and we talked about the fact that I wasn’t a securities lawyer or a lawyer with what some might consider a traditional GC background,” he said. “He said what he was most interested was someone who was smart, worked hard and was trustworthy. It was a good fit on both sides.”
Oasis had about 50 employees when Lorentzatos joined the company. Today, it employs more than 250. During his dozen years at Oasis, he helped create a frac company called Oasis Well Services and a midstream company called Oasis Midstream Partners. Lorentzatos led the move to take OMP public and then recently led its sale to Crestwood for about $2 billion.
“As I started researching oil and gas, I was impressed by how much technology and innovation is involved,” he said. “People don’t often think of oil and gas that way, but I see our industry as one made up of problem solvers. Each well is a little different than the one before it and requires constant thinking, because the subsurface gets a vote and the rock varies from one location to the next. So you always have the opportunity to adjust and improve. If you can foster a culture in your organization where everyone knows it is OK and even encouraged to suggest new things, you can have very powerful results.”
The past three years have been stressful, agonizing and rewarding.
Lorentzatos’s father died in the late spring 2019. His mother died 14 months later. The impact of Covid and the economic recession led Oasis to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2020.
The Chapter 11 was a prepackaged plan that allowed Oasis to emerge from bankruptcy after only two months.
“To do that, we had about six months of 18-hour days, seven days a week, for a small group at Oasis working on the bankruptcy in addition to their day jobs,” he said. “It is a blur, but I think this was during the beginning of Covid, so all of that was going on in the background, too.”
Oasis pared its debt by $1.8 billion. The energy company exited with a new $575 million reserve-based credit facility.
By all accounts, Chapter 11 was a huge success.
“What they don’t tell you about bankruptcy is that when you are done, you feel like you completed the marathon but then discover you are actually competing in a triathlon with two events left, so someone hands you a bike and you get going,” he said.
“This is where the culture we had going into the bankruptcy really came into play,” he said. “You had a group of people who cared deeply about the company and about each other, and they all sacrificed so much to help Oasis succeed.”
Then came the plethora of M&A transactions in 2021, including the two $6 billion-plus mergers. The merger with Whiting Petroleum was announced in March and is expected to close later this year.