When Kevin Feeney joined Shell Oil Company in 2017 as senior counsel of upstream litigation, the file for an ongoing confidential arbitration in Houston immediately crossed his desk. The claim alleged Shell had failed to pay a gatherer what was owed under a gas gathering agreement.
Feeney and his outside lawyers at Thompson & Knight faced many challenges in the dispute.
For starters, $200 million was at stake. It was an amount that could have flipped Shell’s investment, so everyone at Shell was watching the case closely.
For another, a predecessor of Shell signed the agreement, so no one at Shell had direct knowledge of the original negotiations, which took place nearly a decade earlier. This meant Shell had to counter the claimant’s arguments primarily through cross-examination.
Plus, the discovery process yielded more than 250,000 documents to sift through – some of which, including the contract itself, provided little clarity on how to calculate the gathering rate, which was at the heart of the dispute.
After a 17-day arbitration hearing, the panel unanimously found no breach on Shell’s end and rendered a take-nothing judgment.
The arbitration win is why The Texas Lawbook and the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston chapter have named Feeney and his outside lawyers at Thompson & Knight as finalists for Business Litigation of the Year a category under the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards. The finalists will be honored and the winners announced at a reception on April 25 at the Four Seasons in downtown Houston.
Houston Thompson & Knight partners Greg Meece, Robert Paddock and Megan Schmid served as Shell’s outside counsel.
Shell’s outside lawyers said Feeney’s role was critical to obtaining the favorable result. They said he was engaged in the case at a level not usually seen with an in-house client. With the help of outside vendors, he even led the effort of developing demonstratives that proved instrumental in the financially-heavy, complex case.
“I’ve never had a client that engaged in the graphics piece of the case,” Paddock said.
Feeney was also able to get the outside lawyers access to anyone at Shell “on moment’s notice,” which they say is usually unheard at such a large company.
“Kevin was brand new to the company … and was able to get anyone’s attention we needed, which was incredibly important given the complexity of the case and what it covered,” Paddock said.
“If we had lost the case, it would not have been for a lack of information,” Meece said.
From Broadway to Law
If you were to tell Feeney as a child that he would grow up to become an oil and gas lawyer, he probably wouldn’t believe you.
Feeney was born in the suburbs of Chicago but was raised in Albany, Wisconsin, a rural town 30 miles from Madison.
He comes from a large family. He is the fifth of eight children – a quintessential middle child. His mother was a nurse and his father “did a number of things,” Feeney says: he spent the bulk of his career at a manufacturer of heating and furnace parts, but also owned a small business for a while and worked as a spec writer. Feeney’s oldest brother is a lawyer.
Though his school didn’t have a formal debate team, Feeney “talked a lot and loved to debate.” Adults who knew Feeney growing up told him he should become a lawyer –“It’s what you tell kids who like to hear themselves talk,” he explained – a destiny he resisted until reaching that conclusion on his own.
After getting an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, Feeney entered the working world as a professional actor, performing primarily in musicals in the Chicago area.
The most impactful moment of his life came seven years later, when his wife confronted him about no longer being happy as an actor.
“She said, ‘Look, you have to figure this out, because you are not the guy I married,’ ” Feeney recalled. “That prompted me to take the step that led me to where I am in my career.”
He decided to leave acting and try the business world. He got a position as a business manager at Kim and Scott’s Gourmet Pretzels, where he handled the Chicago-based company’s invoicing, accounts receivable and accounts payable; oversaw delivery drivers; and developed an inventory tracking system.
He began craving a more strategic role, and realized he would need to attend graduate school to find that calling. He returned to Northwestern, where he earned his J.D. He joined Schiff Hardin, where he practiced general commercial litigation and white collar.
Another pivotal life moment came in 2008, again prompted by his wife, when she asked if they could move to Houston so she could live closer to her sister, who had been there since the 1990s.
He lateraled to Jones Day, and it was an easy sell.
“When I interviewed at Jones Day, I flew down in February,” Feeney said. “It was 2 degrees at Midway when I got on the plane, and when I got off the plane at Hobby, it was 70 degrees and sunny. I thought, ‘All law firms should recruit people from the Midwest in February.’ ”
Once he joined Jones Day, he began dipping his toes in energy-related cases.
“Unavoidably if you do litigation in Houston, you end up coming in contact with oil and gas litigation of various types,” he said.
Several years later, recruiters for Marathon Oil Company came calling. Feeney decided to join the company’s litigation department. While there, he worked on the litigation stemming from the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, which named mounds of oil companies as defendants that had sold crude oil in North Dakota later transferred to Canada. The litigation resulted in a global settlement – one in which there was “no admission of liability,” Feeney said.
After he had been at Marathon for nearly four years, a position at Shell opened in the company’s upstream litigation department. Feeney was drawn to the “vast array of opportunities to enjoy individual growth” at Shell, a company with 700 lawyers worldwide.
“I liked the scope of the company and scope of the various practices of law one could follow while in-house at Shell,” he said.
The Arbitration
Feeney wasted no time when he arrived at Shell in August 2017. The claimant in the $200 million arbitration, which is confidential, sued after Shell sent notice that it would likely not renew their gas gathering agreement. Shell had inherited the agreement after it purchased hundreds of wells in a significant oil and gas development area from the company that originally went into the agreement with the claimant.
Though the litigation had only been underway for six months when Feeney came on board, there was no lack of issues for him to get up to speed on due to the complexity of the case.
Being six months in also meant Meece, Paddock and Schmid had already been selected as the best fit for outside counsel in the dispute.
“I’m glad they were,” Feeney said. “Sometimes you get outside lawyers who view it as: ‘I’m the trial lawyer here, trust me.’ They’ll disappear for a while and not be all that responsive.
“They were responsive,” he said. “If I had something I needed or a viewpoint I wanted to share, they were very clear about the collaboration that was necessary for this to be successful.”