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A Florida company that makes laser sensors for vehicles filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday in Houston, citing $508 million in liabilities owed to more than 200 creditors but only $189 million in assets.
Luminar Technologies hired Weil Gotshal as its lead outside legal advisor, with Houston partner Stephanie Morrison and New York partner Ronit Berkovich leading the way. The case has been assigned to Houston Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, on the same day a patent holder who won a $445.5 million verdict against Samsung Electronics asked the court for a permanent injunction that would bar the company from selling its infringing phone, the tech giant asked the court for a new trial.
Winston & Strawn announced Monday that it has agreed to a trans-Atlantic merger with Taylor Wessing, the global business law firm ranked among the top 20 law firms in the United Kingdom.
Winston & Strawn’s Dallas and Houston offices ranked 18th in combined Texas lawyer headcount and 15th in Texas-based revenue with $215 million for 2024.
Two Texas corporate giants — Keurig Dr Pepper and Energy Transfer — are the finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year. The senior counsel for both companies are alumni of the same Dallas litigation boutique and the lead outside lawyers are alums of the same law firm but are now trial partners at two of the largest and wealthiest corporate law firms in the world.
The nascent Texas Stock Exchange boosted its total capitalization to $270 million with the addition of $20 million from a new group of investors led by Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
After a November hearing on a motion to dismiss, the two stock exchanges were sent to mediation. Almost a month later, the mediator announced the Texas Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange have come to a resolution in mediation and have until January to file dismissal.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have announced that the corporate legal departments at Celanese and Comerica are the two finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards for M&A Transaction of the Year.
The DFW Corporate Counsel Awards honor in-house lawyers for their extraordinary legal and business successes during the past year.
For the week ended Dec. 13, the CDT Roundup saw 15 deals reported with a total value of just under $10 billion. At this time last year, we saw 15 transactions come across our desks with an aggregate value of $5.3 billion.
In M&A, this edition of CDT Roundup includes a handful of energy-related deals with a shuffling of midstream assets, Texas solar projects selling minority stakes and some offshore rigs trading hands.
And on the CapM side: a SPAC IPO, a nearly $1 billion private placement, a stock buy-back and a post-merger holiday cleanup on the Constellation-Calpine aisle.
The latest tranche of Texas Business Outlook Surveys from the Dallas Fed was released and the outlook self-described — at least among the Texas manufacturing, services and retail sectors surveyed — is not one of unbridled optimism. Kevin Henderson, a founding partner of SMB Law, says, “We still see a ton of M&A activity in the SBA space, but when talking to current business owners, things are definitely not as rosy as they have been in the past in terms of excitement on outlook. People are nervous about tariffs and overall economic impact and how it will affect their businesses.”
A jury in New Mexico sided with a Texas family on Friday, agreeing a defect in a Michelin tire was to blame for an incident that left three people dead. The lawsuit was filed in New Mexico district court in San Miguel County against Michelin North America and Discount Tire Company of New Mexico in 2021.
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