Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A federal judge has frozen the assets of two unknown stock traders amid allegations that they used insider trading to make $2 million from Chevron's announcement to buy The Woodlands-based oil company Anadarko Petroleum. Sergio Chapa of the Houston Chronicle has the breaking story.
Private equity funds are charging higher performance fees, exiting their investments sooner and raising funds faster. The Lawbook's Claire Poole has those figures and the key players in Texas dealmaking last week.
In a trademark lawsuit that began with a coffee cup plopped on his desk, Tracy Richardson led the charge to protect the distinctive Buc-ee's beaver grin from corporate copycats and poachers. Now, he and Buc-ee's are winners in the Business Litigation of the Year category of the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards. Read Mark Curriden's account of this award-winning litigation.
Monica Karuturi, an associate GC at CenterPoint Energy was visiting relatives in India when she first got word that CenterPoint was interested in acquiring Vectren, an Indiana-based utility. Within days she was on a flight to New York City to begin fleshing out the agreement. In the next few months Karuturi's team put together a $6 billion deal that has been named M&A Transaction of the Year in the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards. Mark Curriden has the background on the remarkable, award-winning transaction.
Occidental Petroleum didn’t go with a Texas lawyer for its $38 billion counter-bid for Anadarko Petroleum Corp., whose board already agreed to a $33 billion purchase by Chevron. The company chose Faiza Saeed, presiding partner at Cravath, whose media and entertainment clients have included Time Warner, Disney and DreamWorks. Still, Saeed is no stranger to the energy industry, as Claire Poole reveals.
Legal Counsel Mike Elliott of Carriage Services, a $300 million funeral operations company, has a distinctive approach to litigation: he likes his company to avoid it. To do so he has formed a creative alliance with law firm Shook Hardy Bacon that involves a shared vision of legal needs and something close to absolute professional trust. Their relationship is the sole finalist and thus the winner of the 2019 ACC Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Creative Partnership. Mark Curriden describes that award-winning relationship.
Kevin McDonald leads a legal department with four lawyers that last year successfully led the preparation of the Keane Group’s first proxy statement and first annual stockholders meeting. He helped lead legal support for the acquisition and integration of hydraulic fracturing assets of RSI, a new senior term loan credit facility, a $100 million stock repurchase plan and two underwritten secondary offerings of company stock totaling $307 million. And now he's a finalist for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department in the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards.
DALLAS – Reality TV star Camille Grammer won a real-life verdict Wednesday against the ex-boyfriend she says assaulted her in 2013. A federal jury ruled in a civil case that former corporate lawyer Dimitri Charalambopoulos had, in fact, attacked her in Houston at the Hotel ZaZa, and that she had not defamed him by reporting that he had. Natalie Posgate was in the courtroom.
Eleven years ago, Baker Hughes hired an innovation firm to design for them a motor-based safety valve for use in their wells. Once the valve was developed, one of the designers claimed the patent as his own. In-house patent attorney Anthony Matheny and a team from Bracewell used a lot of law and a good deal of finesse to fend off the claim. Now Baker Hughes, Matheny and the Bracewell attorneys are finalists for Business Litigation of the Year in the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards.
White & Case and Shearman & Sterling announced new hires early this week.
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