Baker Botts LLP
01 May 2007
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.
Baker Botts LLP in Who's Who Legal: Texas
The firm’s history was shaped by the discovery of oil near Houston in 1901. This led to the creation of dozens of oil and oil service companies, who turned to Baker Botts for their services. These companies included Humble Oil (the predecessor of Exxon), Gulf Oil (later merged into Chevron), Texas Co (later Texaco), Howard Hughes’s drill bit company (now Baker Hughes) and many more. The firm’s growth in the intervening years has been consistent and impressive. In the 1940s an office was opened in Mexico City, which became the separate law firm of Santamarina y Steta in the 1970s. That decade also saw new offices in Austin and Washington, DC, with a Dallas office opening in 1985, the reopening of the New York office in 1992 and the establishment of a London office in 1998. Today the firm has approximately 750 lawyers in 11 cities around the globe, including offices in Hong Kong and Beijing.
Baker Botts is without doubt one of the leading firms in the state. Its total of 53 listings is beaten only by Vinson & Elkins, and it has leading individuals in 17 of the 24 areas covered by this book. Fittingly for a firm whose reputation is largely built on its work for energy clients, it performs particularly well in Oil & Gas. The international winner of the ‘Who’s Who Legal Oil & Gas Law Firm of the Year’ for the past three years, Baker Botts has four individuals in this chapter. David Asmus is partner in charge of the firm’s global oil and gas practice – a “first-rate group” with “a deep bench”. Asmus has represented clients such as BP, Occidental Petroleum, Marathon Oil and Japan Energy, to name but a handful. George Goolsby heads Baker Botts’ Russia and CIS practice group from Moscow and Houston, while Michael Darden was praised as “very personable and a good addition to the team”, following his move from Nuevo Energy Company.
Baker Botts’ strongest showing is in Capital Markets. “A real powerhouse”, the firm is “formidable in this field” and has seven featured partners. The firm has represented the issuer in the IPO of Westlake Chemical and Hines Real Estate Investment Trust, involving a best efforts offering of up to $2 billion of common stock. In addition, the firm has represented underwriters such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs & Co, and issuers such as Marathon Oil and Liberty Media International. Roderick Goyne is head of the finance section of the firm’s corporate department and is particularly well known for his “great all-round performance” (he also gives the firm a presence in our Banking chapter), while Stephen Massad, past chair of the firm’s Houston corporate department, also stood out. Massad is the only lawyer from the firm to appear in three practice areas in the publication. He is one of three nominees in Corporate Governance, and all of these – Massad, David Kirkland and Charles Szalkowski – also appear in the M&A chapter as leading transactional lawyers. In this field, the firm has ranked nationally in the top 20 law firms for more than five years and has advised clients on matters ranging from small transactions to over $55 billion international business combinations. Kirkland is chair of the firm’s corporate practice, and an “outstanding individual with a great following”. He is one of five partners in our mergers & acquisitions chapter from the Houston office (Dallas’s “fantastically skilled” Neel Lemon also appears).
The firm is also well represented in Corporate Tax – no other firm has more nominees in that chapter. Chair of the firm’s tax department, Benjamin Wells is highly regarded, as are Gray Jennings and Gregory Nelson (the latter can count Halliburton, Reliant Energy and the Winn-Dixie family among his clients). In addition, the firm is “the firm we find ourselves most often competing against for top environmental work”, according to one source, and is home to “a well-reputed group”, of which five appear in this book. The firm advises a variety of clients, including smaller ad hoc coalitions of energy and chemical manufacturing clients in ongoing litigation and rulemaking connected to Texas air quality challenges, including, ExxonMobil, Valero, Shell and Dow.
The firm also leads the way in the Labour and Employment research, with four practitioners appearing in our chapter, and has the same number of representatives in the real estate section. The firm is reported to be “particularly strong on the leasing side”, with office tenant clients such as KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Baker Botts is also strong in dispute resolution. Two partners are leaders in the field of commercial arbitration, with chair of the firm’s international arbitration and litigation group Michael Goldberg described as an “authority in this field”, and former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan also well regarded. The firm gained international recognition for its defence of President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the Florida state court election contests regarding balloting for the 2000 presidential election, and three partners are included in the Commercial Litigation chapter, including Daryl Bristow and Irvin Terrell, who were both involved in that case.
In other areas, the firm has a “great reputation” for pharmaceuticals and chemical product liability defence work with three partners appearing in the relevant chapter. No other firm can better Baker Botts’ three nominees in the Employee Benefits section. Said to be “very strong in this area”, the firm has clients covering the whole business spectrum, from small to very large employers with a full array of employee benefit plans and executive compensation arrangements.
Individual partners also appear in the competition and insolvency & restructuring chapters, and Baker Botts also has a profile in the area of intellectual property. Paul Morico’s “vast experience” in trademark matters, especially in technological disputes, impressed his peers and has gained clients such as Alcatel and Esterline Tech. Scott Partridge is one of two nominees in the Patents chapter, and counts Alcatel USA Resources, Nike and Cirrus Logic among his clients, while Bart Showalter has represented Cisco, Encyclopædia Britannica, Fujitsu, Ericsson and Cingular.
To see more profiled firms from Texas, vist the Firm Profiles page in the Texas Special Report