Blaine Edwards was a teenager when he started going through invoices and receipts for his parents’ petroleum wholesale business and noticed several unpaid bills that dated back for a year or more.
Edwards got his parents to agree to allow him to pursue in small claims court the unpaid debts, which ranged from several hundred dollars to about $1,500.
“I filed five cases and I got a call from one of the people who owed money telling me that I didn’t have to sue him,” Edwards recalled. “I told him that he didn’t have to stiff my parents of the money he owed them.
“The only person my parents wouldn’t let me sue was my uncle who owed them a good bit of money,” he said. “I still tell people today that small claims court can be very effective.”
Edwards is now associate general counsel and head of litigation at Houston-based Superior Energy Services. The Association of Corporate Counsel Houston chapter and The Texas Lawbook are proud to announce that he is a finalist for Senior Counsel of the Year for Mid-Sized Legal Departments in the 2019 Corporate Counsel Awards.
Edwards is being honored for leading a three-year legal battle that resulted in his company suing two of its former executives as well as dozens of other individuals and businesses for breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and conspiracy.
Last Friday, Harris County District Judge Caroline Baker issued a final judgment awarding Superior Energy more than $70 million in damages.
“This has been the craziest and most difficult case of my career,” Edwards said.
“Blaine’s work in that investigation and in the lawsuit, from the initiation of the petition to the final trial verdict on Dec. 1 showed extreme dedication and diligence in the performance of his duties,” Baker McKenzie partner Thomas Kruse wrote in nominating Edwards for the award.
Born and raised in the Texas Panhandle, Edwards earned a degree in accounting and finance at Texas A&M and then his law degree from St. Mary’s University in 1990.
“I grew up in a community where everyone looked up to bankers and lawyers,” he said. “I have no lawyers in my family, though my family looks at me as if I am their de facto general counsel. My parents paid my tuition, so I look at that as their prepaid billable hours.”
Fulbright & Jaworski – now Norton Rose Fulbright – hired Edwards in its litigation section, which is where he first met Kruse.
In 2007, Edwards joined Houston-based BJ Services as its associate general counsel – a position he held for nearly four years. He was significantly involved in the sale of BJ Services to Baker Hughes in 2010 for $5.5 billion.
Superior Energy, an oilfield services company with an $800 million market cap, officials came calling in the summer of 2011, making Edwards its assistant general counsel and global head of litigation.
Edwards joined Superior Energy just as the company was finalizing its $3 billion merger with Complete Production Services.
In early 2016, someone at Superior Energy raised a red flag to the legal department about one of Stabil Drill Specialties’ largest vendors.
“The thing that set off the alarm bells was that this vendor, who we had paid nearly $40 million over a few years, had absolutely no presence on the web,” he said.
Superior Energy immediately opened an internal investigation. Edwards reviewed vendor contracts and read through hundreds of internal corporate emails.
“We realized within a week or two that there was something going on with the chief financial officer and chief operating officer of one of our subsidiaries, Stabil Drill Specialities, and an outside vendor,” he said. “Basically, the team determined that the COO and CFO had a financial interest in the vendors that they had not disclosed.”
Superior Chief Compliance Officer Christine Chaney and Edwards also discovered that a company doing inspection services and supplying pipes were paying kickbacks to the executives.
Superior Energy officials initially tried to present the case they developed to law enforcement, but the criminal investigation went nowhere.
“The authorities were contacted, and they didn’t do shit,” he said. “It is one of my pet peeves about this whole thing.”
Edwards hired Kruse, a partner at the global law firm Baker McKenzie, to bring a civil lawsuit to recoup the company’s losses.
In April 2016, Superior Energy filed a complaint against Christopher Russo, Martin LeBlanc and about 30 other individuals and related entities alleging breach of fiduciary duties, fraud, making material misrepresentations, failure to disclose material information and conspiracy.
“We even sued their accountant who did taxes for the COO and also represented one of Superior Energy’s subsidiaries. The accountant testified that he never asked the COO where all of his money was coming from,” Edwards said.
The accountant settled before trial for undisclosed terms.
A major development in the case came last summer when the Texas Court of Appeals ordered the COO to turn over key documents and emails regarding the alleged schemes.
In all, Edwards spent more than 2,500 hours focused on the litigation, while also dealing with about 75 other separate matters.
“I attended every deposition, every strategy meeting, nearly every court hearing and I was there every day of the six-week trial,” he said. “All of our senior officers were either deposed or took the witness stand during the trial.
“Getting the documents from the court of appeals was critical because they clearly outlined what was going on,” he said.
From late October through November, the two sides battled it out in court. The 12-person jury deliberated two days before returning the $60 million verdict in favor of Superior Energy on Dec. 5. The judge added pretrial and post-judgment interest.
“There was great relief when I heard the jury read the verdict, but I also felt very sad that this whole thing had ever happened,” Edwards said. “We had an incredible jury who listened and really understood the case. Juries are great at determining who is lying and who is telling the truth.
“I handle disputes all over the world, and the American jury system is the best,” he said. “Juries try to get things right.”