Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has promoted Fort Worth Regional Office Associate Regional Director of Enforcement Eric R. Werner to the region’s top position – regional director.
The SEC’s decision to make Werner its top corporate cop in the region is garnering praise from lawyers who know him.
Honeywell Smart Energy GC Dionne Hamilton has scored several successes during her 30 months on the job, including leading the legal department’s role in the company’s launch of revolutionary gas meter technology that monitors residential and commercial activities in real time and stops incidents before they occur. She advises senior corporate leadership on all legal issues, new regulatory activities and geopolitical subjects that impact operations, works on M&A and joint ventures and manages all aspects of the legal budget. Hamilton is also national leader on DEI.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named the UT Law graduate a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
For nearly all of 2022 and the first few months of 2023, Talos Energy GC Bill Moss guided the Houston company through the negotiations and highly complex $1.1 billion acquisition of EnVen, a fellow deep-water operator in the Gulf of Mexico.
“It was a difficult deal to get done,” said Moss, who has corporate law in his DNA.
Citing the complexity of the deal, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named the Talos acquisition, led by Moss and Vinson & Elkins as outside counsel, as a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year. This article looks at the Talos acquisition and the GC behind it.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a request from a handful of major oil companies seeking to move climate-related lawsuits filed in state court to federal court and a Dallas County jury recently found that Robert L. Winspear and his business colleague defrauded a finance lender.
A team of lawyers from McKool Smith and Irell & Manella secured a $303 million patent infringement verdict on Friday in U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap’s courtroom after convincing the jury that Samsung willfully infringed Netlist’s patents related to computer memory technology. The same day, in a trial before U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, a jury sided with Textron Innovations, finding that SZ DJI Technology owes $279 million for infringing two patents related to drones.
This week’s edition of P.S. features a Houston law firm’s six-figure award to a nonprofit dedicated to fair debt collection and responsible lending practices, May dates (and sponsor information) for the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program’s free legal clinics, the upcoming launch of one of the state’s first virtual court kiosks and an update on a Houston Bar Foundation-affiliated pro bono award previously reported on that involves a group of six first-year associates.
The Texas Supreme Court rejected MRC Permian’s attempt to invoke a contract’s force majeure clause when it missed a deadline to drill a new well. MRC pointed to a well collapse at a different side for the delay, while Point Energy said MRC simply miscalculated the deadline.
From 2010 to 2018, the Texas economy boomed and dozens of national law firms opened offices in the state. But the total number of corporate lawyers working at the firms stayed flat. In 2019, that changed. The 50 largest corporate firms in Texas have grown lawyer count in record numbers the past four years, including in 2022. While Big Law has returned to pre-pandemic scrutiny of underperforming attorneys, most of the larger firms are still planning for record-sized summer associate classes and fall hiring of first-year lawyers.
The Lawbook caught up with Lu about his move to Willkie from V&E earlier this year, the emerging trends he is paying attention to and the “fuel that keeps [his] fire burning” as a deal lawyer.
There is undeniable momentum for women attorneys, which is good news, indeed. Instead of one token female at counsel’s table, there are women in numbers on both sides of the aisle. But there is still a ways to go, particularly in intellectual property law, where my engineering background and gender still make me something of a rarity.
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