Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison announced Monday that its Houston office has added two major deal lawyers: Aisha Lavinier from Kirkland & Ellis to its corporate department and Jim Cole from Latham & Watkins to tax.
“Aisha and Jim are excellent lawyers with great experience working on major transactions,” said Paul, Weiss Chairman Scott A. Barshay. “We are thrilled to welcome them both to our firm.”
“Their arrivals mark an exciting step in the continued growth of our Houston team,” said Sean Wheeler, the global co-chair for M&A and head of the firm’s Houston office, who has worked with and around both.
Wheeler left Kirkland in February with colleague Debbie Yee to form the Paul, Weiss Houston office. Wheeler had also worked at Latham where Cole has been since 2013.
“Aisha’s versatility in advising clients from a broad range of industries on transformative deals, and Jim’s breadth of experience advising energy clients through all the tax implications of their most important transactions, including on energy tax incentives, each strengthen our full-service transactional offering in Houston,” Wheeler said.
Lavinier, a 2013 cum laude graduate of Northwestern University’s Pritzker Law School Law, has forged a fashionable dealmaker profile in more than 12 years at Kirkland.
She’s represented a broad range of private equity sponsors, public and private companies and financial investors on mergers and acquisitions, capital financing, joint ventures and carve-outs, including such clients as Thoma Bravo, Clearlake Capital, Arlington Capital Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Bain Capital.
With an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Rice University, she is comfortable advising on legal side of a variety of technical subjects: from healthcare and life sciences to chemicals and digital infrastructure.
Cole, on the tax side, has been an extremely familiar name on Latham deal teams, appearing on more than 200 deals reported to The Lawbook’s Corporate Deal Tracker database since 2018.
A 2011 graduate of the University of Houston School of Law, Cole joined Latham in 2013 after four years as a tax consultant at Deloitte and two years as a tax associate at Locke Lord. While there he built a foundational practice on the taxation side of energy transactions, whether traditional or alternative featuring clients like CPP Investments, EOG Resources, Altus Power, Targa Resources and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners.