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With Ivett Hughes at the Helm in Houston, ‘Baker Hughes is a Corporate Leader in Pro Bono Service’ - In the first quarter of 2024, Baker Hughes launched a global legal and compliance diversity, inclusion and belonging counsel with the mission of infusing those values into the legal department through internal and external engagement. Led by Ivett Hughes in Houston, a regional team of lawyers and staff partnered with Houston Volunteer Lawyers to represent four clients — roughly one pro bono case per five lawyers. They blew past their goal by 500 percent. The Houston Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook have selected Hughes and Baker Hughes as its 2025 Achievement in Pro Bono and Public Service award recipient. May 14, 2025
Kathryn Hand Achieves a Host of Early Successes at Enbridge - Kathryn Hand’s first job out of college in 2013 was, in her words, “not-so-great — it felt mindless to me. I knew I needed a career that was going to be challenging,” she told The Texas Lawbook.
In the dozen years since, Hand obtained her law degree, spent five years getting trial experience and has spent the past two years scoring litigation achievements as senior counsel for litigation at Canada-based midstream energy giant Enbridge, including winning a case at the Ohio Supreme Court in which hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. Citing her remarkable achievements in such a short time, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Hand as one of two finalists for the 2025 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year. May 13, 2025Expert Voices
Federal-Style CFIUS Review May Be Coming to Texas - On March 13, the Texas Legislature introduced HB 5007, which, if enacted, would establish the Texas Committee on Foreign Investment, the first U.S. state regime tasked with screening foreign investments on national security grounds. The proposed TCFI is not an entirely new idea; indeed, it closely mimics the responsibilities and purpose of its national regulatory counterpart, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. May 14, 2025
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Texas Firm Headcount Inched Up 1% in 2024 - Big corporate law firms operating in Texas dramatically slowed their hiring in 2024, adding the fewest new lawyers since the pandemic year of 2020. The 50 largest law firms doing business in Texas grew, on average, by only two attorneys last year — down from an average of four in 2023, according to new data compiled as part of the Texas Lawbook 50 annual firm business review. And that number is skewed due to the significant headcount growth of four law firms — Jackson Walker, Kirkland & Ellis, Paul Hastings and Sheppard Mullin. Remove those four firms and the average firm in Texas witnessed a lawyer headcount decline in 2024. April 28, 2025
