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The Corporate Deal Tracker rankings for the first half of 2016 are official. The usual law firms and individual lawyers rank in the top 20 for M&A and securities offerings, but there are a few surprises. The numbers show that, despite the oil and gas slow down, Houston transactional lawyers are still busier than their Dallas counterparts. The bottom line is that competition among M&A and capital markets lawyers is fiercer than ever, even as deal activity remains slow.

Delaware recently adopted amendments, effective August 1, 2016, to an oft-used statute that streamlines the acquisition of a Delaware public corporation structured as a tender offer followed by a back-end merger. Since its adoption, this statute has been welcomed by buyers, targets and their stockholders, as well as the lawyers who work on these transactions. The effectiveness of the Delaware amendments presents an opportunity to highlight the fact that Texas adopted a statute in its last legislative session that permits the same transaction structure and carries many of the same advantages.

As demand for water grows throughout Texas, there has been an increasing focus on the rights relating to the ownership and use of groundwater in our state. As a result, a number of significant issues relating to groundwater rights have found their way into our state courts, and the Texas Supreme Court has not been shy in its willingness to jump in to clarify these issues as they arise.

Texas lawyers from Porter Hedges and Weil, Gotshal & Manges worked on a couple of the biggest deals announced in the past week.

In a precedent-setting decision, the Circuit ruled that PTAB improperly threw out Magnum Oil’s patent by essentially adopting arguments on behalf of an outside party that had challenged the patent’s validity – even though that party did not make those arguments and failed to present valid reasons to support them.

Texas lawyers found that the capital markets remained tight-fisted during the first six months of this year, but new data indicates that the door to the vault might be cracking open ever so slightly for the rest of 2016.

The Texas Lawbook’s Corporate Deal Tracker shows that Texas-based lawyers worked on 115 securities offerings valued at $51.5 billion in the first half of the year. That marks a significant decline from the deal flow witnessed in H1 2015 – down 35 percent on count and 45 percent on value – but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the market conditions during the second half of last year, the data shows.