Texas
Search Texas
Use the form below to search for lawyers or firms in Texas.
Texas In Brief
Texas In Brief
Texas identifies 578 of the state’s finest practitioners in 24 practice areas. Although a proportion of these are based in the large metropolitan areas of Dallas, Houston and Austin, the publication also recognises the important role a number of other cities play in the state’s vibrant business and legal market. The US Census Bureau estimated that the population of Texas had reached 23,507,783 in July 2006, ranking it second behind California, and with a total area of 268,581 square miles Texas is the second largest state after Alaska.The Lone Star State’s geographical centrality between the East and West coasts makes it an attractive place to do business and Fortune Magazine’s 2007 ranking of the United States’ largest corporations by revenue reveals that 56 of the Fortune 500 are headquartered in the state, just one short of New York’s total.
Aviation, aerospace and manufacturing all loom large while the state also boasts a rich array of hi-tech companies – the Austin suburb of Round Rock is home to Dell and many computing and semiconductor companies have operations in the surrounding area, known as the ‘Silicon Hills’. Health care is another prominent sector in the state, driven in part by the prominence of Houston’s Texas Medical Center, the largest medical district in the world with 45 medical institutions, 13 of which are hospitals and two of which are specialised patient facilities. As one would expect, however, the greatest focus is on the energy sector as well as oil and gas equipment and services. According to the Energy Information Administration, a statistical agency of the US Department of Energy, Texas leads the US in fossil fuel reserves, boasting almost one quarter of the crude oil and three-tenths of the natural gas reserves of the US. The state’s refineries can process more than 4.6 million barrels of crude a day and companies such as Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy, Marathon Oil, Halliburton and Plains All American Pipeline are all headquartered in the state.
These industries, and the companies associated with them, consequently provide a great deal of work for the firms and individuals featured on the following pages. Our research identifies a wide array of legal talent within the state, with boutique and specialist outfits rubbing shoulders with some of the legal profession’s most recognised firms. The publication also features some of the industry’s most respected practitioners in over twenty practice areas. Using each chapter as a lens, we are able to highlight certain firms that stand out from the pack based on the number of partners we identify.
Editorial
Editorial: Texas
Editorial: Corporate Tax in Texas
Research for this chapter identified 20 leaders in corporate tax law from 13 firms in the state. These professionals possess a wide range of specialisations. International tax specialists are included alongside domestic experts, direct taxation practitioners feature in a list that also includes indirect tax lawyers and specialists on transfer pricing and tax issues deriving from M&A and dispositions, as well as generalists.
Editorial: Employee Benefits in Texas
The wide variety of claims that corporations can be subject to, often involving potential liability in millions of dollars, means that this area is of increasing importance to clients and by extension their outside counsel. This, coupled with the recent changes in regulations in this area, has led to high levels of activity for the partners featured in this chapter – “the government is keeping us busy”, as one souce puts it.
Editorial: Environment in Texas
Texas boasts the second-largest economy in the United States and according to Fortune magazine’s 2007 ranking of America’s largest corporations by revenue, it is home to over 10 per cent of the Fortune 500. Many of these corporations operate in environmentally sensitive areas. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is the largest comprehensive state environmental agency in the US, with approximately 2,900 employees, 16 regional offices and an operating budget of $480.7 million for 2007.
Editorial: Franchise in Texas
A very select band of lawyers make up this chapter, which identifies just six individuals from three firms. We recognise them as the leading lights of Texas’s Franchise Bar. They represent companies of all sizes, in diverse industries.
Editorial: Insolvency and Restructuring in Texas
Despite the relative health of the US economy in recent years, there remains ample restructuring and bankruptcy work for Texan lawyers. This chapter identifies 29 outstanding private practitioners in the state.
Profiled Firms
Firm Profiles: Texas
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP
Akin Gump’s Texan roots stretch back to its inception in 1945, when Agents Richard Gump and Robert Strauss left the FBI to open Gump & Strauss law firm in Dallas.
Andrews Kurth LLP
Andrews Kurth LLP has grown from a small Houston-based partnership formed in 1902 under the name Andrews & Ball, to an international firm with over 400 lawyers in nine offices.
Baker Botts LLP
Baker Botts LLP is Texan through and through. It can trace its history to the earliest days of Texas, when founding partner Peter Gray was admitted to the bar of the Republic of Texas in 1840, just three years after the city of Houston was founded. The firm became Baker & Botts in 1874, and retained that name until 2000 when it took on the title it has today.
Bracewell & Giuliani LLP
The firm we know today as Bracewell & Giuliani LLP was founded in 1945 in Houston, under the name of Bracewell & Tunks. Today the firm has approximately 400 lawyers practising in 10 offices across the US, the UK and Kazakhstan, hitting the headlines in 2005 with the opening of a New York office, headed by the former New York City Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani.
Fulbright & Jaworski LLP
Fulbright & Jaworski LLP is an international law firm with an enviable position in its home market.
Focus On Corporate Counsel
Corporate Counsel Q&A: Texas
Texas Corporate Counsel: Michael Nichols
Senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, Sysco Corporation
Sysco is based in Houston and provides food and related products and services to approximately 390,000 restaurants, health care and educational facilities, lodging establishments and other customers. Sysco’s operations, supported by 47,500 associates, are located throughout the United States and Canada and include broadline companies, specialty produce and custom-cut meat operations, Asian cuisine foodservice distributors, hotel supply operations, and chain restaurant distribution subsidiaries that serve both domestic and international locations.