© 2017 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
(March 16) – A group of lawyers from Locke Lord and Kelly Hart & Hallman said Thursday that they worked on a deal that facilitated the formation of Luxe Minerals, a new private Austin-based company that acquires mineral and royalty interests in premier basins in the U.S.
The company’s formation, announced Monday, came by way of a $254 million equity commitment from NGP’s Natural Resources XI.
NGP General Counsel Jeff Zlotky hired Locke Lord’s Mitch Tiras to handle the equity commitment. Additional deal team members included Houston senior counsel Mechelle Smith and partner Sara Longtain.
Tiras led two previous NGP equity commitments to Luxe Energy, an exploration & production company that was formed in May 2015 by the same management team behind Luxe Minerals. Tiras and Smith co-led the $500 million equity commitment by NGP that helped get Luxe Energy started. Over a year later, Tiras and law partner Eric Larson led another NGP investment of $524 million in Luxe.
Luxe turned to Carl von Merz, a partner in Kelly Hart’s Austin office, to handle its end of the deal. Others on the Kelly Hart deal team included Fort Worth tax partner Tom Hegi and Austin energy associate Taylor Spalla.
Luxe’s general counsel, Sam Patranella, was also heavily involved in the deal. He most recently served as principal counsel at Statoil. He also worked in-house for Concho Resources, and before that practiced at the Midland firm Davis, Gerald & Cremer, where he focused on oil & gas M&A.
Von Merz is also a Statoil alum. According to his LinkedIn page, von Merz left his role as Statoil’s lead legal counsel in October 2015 to join Kelly Hart. Before going in-house, von Merz previously practiced at Vinson & Elkins and King & Spalding.
Patranella and von Merz have led a couple of previous deals together for Luxe. In October, Patranella, von Merz, Hegi and Spalla represented Luxe Energy in the same $524 million equity commitment by NGP that Locke Lord was involved in. In January 2016, von Merz and Patranella worked together on Luxe Energy’s acquisition of E&P properties from Fort Worth-based Finley Resources. Spalla and Fort Worth energy associate Drew Neal were also involved in that deal.
Luxe Minerals will focus its mineral and royalty interest efforts in West Texas’s Midland and Delaware basins, Oklahoma’s STACK/SCOOP/MERGE plays, South Texas’s Eagle Ford Shale, North Dakota’s Bakken formation, Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and Colorado’s DJ Basin.
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