Omar Samji, the Houston-based lawyer whose career in power and renewables spans more than two decades and six law firms, has left Weil for Gibson Dunn, the firm is announcing today.
For Samji, it is a return to Gibson where he served as an associate for more than four years. The portfolio of business he’s accrued over the years includes counsel to a broad range of clients — including energy companies, infrastructure sponsors and investors — on complex M&A, private equity and debt investments, along with project development in the increasingly complex and data center-driven energy transition space.
“The power and renewables market is growing in both scale and complexity — driven by AI-related load growth, energy transition demands, and a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape — and Omar brings the sophisticated transactional experience clients need to navigate these opportunities,” said Tomer Pinkusiewicz, co-chair of Gibson’s Energy and Infrastructure Practice Group.
“Our lawyers know firsthand the caliber of partner and colleague Omar is, and we are thrilled to welcome him back.”
Says Hillary Holmes, co-partner in charge of the firm’s Houston office in the firm’s announcement: “With Texas standing as the largest and most dynamic power market in the country, and Houston as a leading global hub for energy and infrastructure investment, Omar’s experience advising on strategic acquisitions, large-scale projects, and energy transition matters is invaluable to our clients.”
Samji’s skillset wasn’t tooled in data center deals, but his experience is custom-made for a market that needs power churned from all its various forms.
As noted, since his graduation from Columbia Law School in 2004, Samji has worked at six different firms: First, at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, followed by two years at Paul Hastings, then to that four-year earlier stint at Gibson Dunn. He left for Jones Day 2012, became a partner and during his six years there advised a variety of upstream energy clients like Titan Energy and Hawkwood Energy.
In 2018 he landed at Shearman & Sterling where advised clients like EnCap Flatrock Midstream, Energy & Minerals Group, Oryx Midstream, Frontier Midstream and DTE Midstream on acquisitions and joint venture projects. But he also worked with clients like NextEra Energy that invested in renewables and low carbonization projects for data centers like the King Mountain wind project in McCamey, Texas, that helped power a bitcoin mining operation.
He moved to Weil in 2023 where he continued to advise a broad swath of clients (DT Midstream, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Whitehawk Energy, Distributed Solar Development, etc.) on traditional upstream, midstream and sometimes exotic alternative energy deals.
While at Shearman, Samji was involved in the development of an off-grid power project for California City, California, an isolated community 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The project involved a company called Baker Energy Team, a brainchild of Dusty Baker, the legendary baseball player and manager. Baker Energy ultimately divested from the project when Baker was named manager of the Houston Astros in 2020.
“Baker Energy had initiated the project, and I had the good fortune of beginning to work with Baker Energy. A couple of months into that work, Dusty Baker happened to get tapped (in 2020) by the Houston Astros. So, we’re on Zoom and Dusty said, ‘You know, I am going to be pretty unavailable. I’ve got to get ready to move.’ I told Dusty, ‘By the way, I live in Houston.’ It worked out pretty well to be the only guy that the new manager of the baseball club knows when he arrives in town. Dusty Baker has become a pretty good family friend, actually.”
Baker personally later divested from the project, but in May of 2021, the city of California City announced an agreement to develop an energy service agreement for the development of a 3-Gigawatt microgrid.
Samji notes that the role of the microgrid has become vital to the development of data centers. While the use of, say, solar energy to fuel a utility-scale battery is a relatively clean process, blending a solar system or a small-scale nuclear module is intellectually appealing, technical and regulatory chokepoints abound, Samji says.
“Using solar power to charge a battery is fairly straightforward. Taking solar power and putting it on the grid is quite complicated because of the physics of how power grids work,” Samji says. “It’s not like (oil and gas) pipelines where you can just build a lateral into a larger pipeline. The way the power grid works, it’s all interconnected; it’s more like a web. And once you put new power in there, it has effects all over the web.”
Samji says he looks forward to spending the next couple of decades working on such problems. And he decided he wants to do so at Gibson Dunn.
“I was like, ‘Okay, where can I go spend twenty years helping clients solve that?’ I need a firm that has all the attributes and is going to be where the partners actually are incentivized, and the structure of the firm creates, you know, collaboration and teamwork. And where clients are going.”