More Stories

For a small oil and gas company like Dallas-based Longview Energy, the chance to obtain a lease in the red-hot Eagle Ford Shale was an opportunity that doesn’t come along every day. So it was a huge disappointment in 2010 when a promising lease of 46,000 acres was rejected by two of the company’s directors, representatives of The Huff Energy Fund, a New Jersey private equity company that owns 39 percent of Longview.

What Longview did not know is that three days earlier, the very same land had been secured by a portfolio group that was 99 percent owned by the equity fund. Now, a South Texas judge has awarded Longview Energy the rights to the land valued at more than $500 million. It is one of the largest judgments ever involving the Eagle Ford play.

Latham partner Jeffrey Munoz represents Plains. Gardere partner Douglas Eyberg advises BP.

Private equity firms continue to invest big money in the oil patch, and that is good news for Texas energy lawyers.

Private equity firms continue to invest big money in the oil patch, and that is good news for Texas energy lawyers.

The Texas Attorney General claims in court that the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 is outdated, unnecessary and an unconstitutional encroachment on the sovereignty of the state, but his legal efforts may have just assured the law’s survival. Election law experts say that the VRA rose from near death – or at least irrelevance – last week when a federal court ruled that Texas legislators committed intentional racial discrimination when they drew new voting districts in 2011.

“It is amazing that Texas officials intended to kill the Voting Rights Act, but because of the evidence of intentional discrimination, they may have just resurrected it,” says University of Michigan law professor Ellen Katz, a nationally recognized election law expert.

The Texas Supreme Court threw out a $46 million award to a man who was crushed by a rolling U-Haul truck, finding that evidence of safety problems in Canadian trucks was improperly admitted in a Dallas County trial.

The justices said there is enough evidence for a re-trial on negligence and actual damages, but rendered a take-nothing judgment on the jury’s gross negligence findings and punitive damages. The six-person jury’s initial award of $84 million in the case was the fifth largest verdict in the nation in 2008, according to Dunn & Bradstreet. V&E’s Tom Leatherbury represents U-Haul.

Two private equity firms are paying $850 million to take publicly traded Houston-based TPC Group private.