When I started The Texas Lawbook nearly six years ago, I dreamed of being able to have some of the best legal and business journalists writing for our publication.
In January, long-time ABA Journal Editor and former U.S. Supreme Court correspondent Allen Pusey joined The Lawbook as senior editor.
Today, I am honored to announce that Claire Poole, one of the truly respected energy M&A journalists in the U.S., is joining The Lawbook team as a contributing correspondent in Houston covering corporate transactions and the legal profession.
A native of Houston, Claire spent 16 years at The Deal covering mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, private equity, securities offerings and M&A trends in the oil patch.
Prior to joining The Deal, Claire worked as a reporter and staff writer at Forbes, was editor of El Financiero International and Mexico Business and was a contributing editor at LatinTrade. She also contributed articles to Money, Worth, BusinessWeek and Texas Monthly.
Claire currently also writes regularly for Forbes and Crain’s Houston.
As The Texas Lawbook has grown – we now have more than 8,400 paid subscribers, including nearly 1,900 corporate in-house counsel – our staff has expanded, too. In November 2011, it was just creative director Mike Skinner, office manager Sally Selio and me.
Within weeks, we landed our first star journalist – former Wall Street Journal and Houston Chronicle legal reporter Janet Elliott, who writes about the Texas Supreme Court for us. A few months later, Natalie Posgate and Brooks Igo joined us straight out of journalism and business school. Natalie has become a star reporter and Brooks leads our subscription, advertising and sponsorship efforts. Late last year, lawyer Jason Curriden – yes, he is my brother – came on board as a special editor and legal counsel.
During the past few months, The Lawbook has inked editorial partnerships with the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Business Journal. We are also the official media voice of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter. This year alone, we are adding a new corporate general counsel or an in-house lawyer as a subscriber at a rate of one per day.
Our goal is to provide unique, thoughtful and substantive content to business lawyers in Texas.
Adding a journalist of Claire Poole’s quality is a huge step for The Lawbook. Claire will be joining Allen, Natalie, Brooks and me at meetings with law firms across Texas during the next few months.
Here is a Q&A with Claire to help you know her a little better:
Lawbook: Tell us about where you were born and how you grew up.
Claire: I was born on the westside of Houston, which was just beginning to be developed. When we were kids, we used to hike and bike around the woods, berry pick in the summer and swim in ditches after rainstorms. So it almost felt like I spent my early years in the country even though we were in the shadow of then the country’s sixth largest city, which eventually grew out to meet us.
Lawbook: Did you have family members who were either lawyers or journalists? If so, tell us about them.
Claire: Not in my immediate family; they were mostly entrepreneurs. My father owned a piano store near downtown that he inherited from his father and my other grandfather had a thriving tire distributorship. But I had a really smart second cousin who was doing great work in the civil rights division of the U.S. attorney’s office, so I always thought I would go to law school but didn’t.
Lawbook: How did you decide you wanted to be a journalist?
Claire: I always liked to write and thought it would be a decent way to earn a living, even though I had lots of dissuaders. I took a journalism class in high school and never looked back.
Lawbook: Tell us about the circumstances about how you got back to Houston?
Claire: I was a reporter for Forbes in New York and there was an opening for a staff writer in the Houston bureau, so I jumped at the chance for a promotion as well as a way to get back home.
Lawbook: How did you start writing about M&A?
Claire: In 2000 I was freelancing for several publications in Houston when a former colleague at a newspaper I worked for in Mexico City reached out and said a startup he had joined was looking for a Houston energy writer. So I signed up.
Lawbook: What are two or three of the biggest or most important deals that you have covered?
Claire: Back in 2000, big oil and gas companies began to merge like crazy after the BP-Amoco-Arco and Exxon-Mobil combinations, and I wrote about a lot of them, including Chevron-Texaco and Conoco-Phillips. Smaller oil and gas companies were also combining, so I covered a lot of those, including Devon’s purchase of Ocean and Mitchell Energy, Anadarko’s acquisition of Kerr-McGee and Western Gas and Conoco’s buyout of Burlington. I also covered the next big wave of deals after that, including Exxon-XTO and BHP-Petrohawk. And then there were the ones that fell apart, including Dynegy’s attempted white knight purchase of Enron (whose trial I covered) and more recently Halliburton-Baker Hughes and Energy Transfer-Williams.
Lawbook: What are your biggest frustrations in covering oil and gas M&A?
Claire: Scoops that are handed to other media outlets, which leaves the rest of us chasing after them, as well as getting pertinent information when deals are announced, including how they came about, whether they’re fairly valued, what specific cost savings/synergies they’re expected to achieve (if any), what regulatory challenges they may face, break-up fees, etc.
Lawbook: What facts or circumstances in an M&A transaction make it newsworthy?
Claire: There are so many depending on the deal. But I would say the biggest are how the transaction is priced, how it will help the buyer down the road (and are their corporate cultures compatible) and what the deal says about the business environment at that moment — and what could be next.
Lawbook: What advice do you have for law firms to make it easier for them to have their M&A transactions covered?
Claire: Get information out about their involvement in the deal early. And then make the lawyers accessible to talk about it and give it some context, both in relation to their firm and the current business environment.
Lawbook: What do certain law firms do that make it easier on you?
Claire: Same as above.
Lawbook: What are your pet peeves in writing about M&A transactions?
Claire: Getting important information after I’ve published.
Lawbook: What do you enjoy most about being an oil and gas M&A writer?
Claire: It’s fun; you never know what your day is going to be like. Finding a way to write about a deal that no one else has done. I also like getting to know sources. Building that mutual trust is how you get information no one else has.