Lawyers with Smyser Kaplan & Veselka are shown seated on front row, from left, Dane Ball, partner, Michelle Stratton, counsel, and Larry Veselka, partner. On the back row from left are Lee Kaplan, Karima Maloney, Craig Smyser, Shaun Clarke and Anthony Phillips, all partners.

Winner in the Small Firm Category

A Louisiana dentist accused by federal prosecutors of profiting from an insider trading scheme turned to attorneys at Smyser Kaplan & Veselka for help. So did the litigation trustee for Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations who alleged that four New York hedge funds illegally siphoned off the company's oil and gas assets.

Houston-based Smyser Kaplan was successful in both cases in 2017. With only 22 lawyers, the firm has a substantial white-collar criminal defense practice in addition to representing clients in complex civil litigation.

“I think it's unusual for a firm our size,” said Shaun Clarke, a Smyser Kaplan partner.

Craig Smyser, a founding partner of the 23-year-old firm, said that from the start Smyser Kaplan was a complex civil trial firm, although Larry Veselka, another founding partner, occasionally handled white-collar defense work. But after Clarke, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Orleans, and Dane Ball, who handled white-collar criminal matters in private practice joined Smyser Kaplan in 2014, it began ramping up its criminal defense practice. Clarke noted that he, Ball and David Isaak, a partner who joined the firm in 2015, had practiced together in the past. Five of the firm's partners, including Karima Maloney and Anthony Phillips, now spend a significant amount of their time on white-collar criminal defense cases.

“This is just really an outstanding collection of well-balanced trial lawyers,” Maloney said.

In August 2017, Clarke and Ball convinced a jury in the U.S. district court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to return a not guilty verdict against Dr. Jesse H. Roberts III, a Louisiana dentist indicted along with his brother-in-law for insider trading prior to the Chicago Bridge & Iron Co.'s acquisition of The Shaw Group, a Louisiana-based energy construction company. Ball said the government alleged that Roberts was tipped off about the upcoming acquisition of Shaw by his brother-in-law, Scott Zeringue, a Shaw executive, and that Roberts then tipped a friend before the merger.

“It was a tip, but it was not material nonpublic information,” Ball said, adding that the information on which Roberts based his purchase of Shaw stock options had been “widely known.”

According to a Feb. 19, 2015, news release issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Roberts reaped more than $765,000 from trading the Shaw call option contracts. The Smyser Kaplan lawyers won an acquittal of Roberts, despite the fact that Zeringue pleaded guilty and testified against him.

Also in 2017, Clarke and Ball represented state Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, who was indicted on corruption charges stemming from allegations that she made false entries on travel vouchers submitted to the House Business Office. Clarke said the charges were laid out in three separate indictments.

“We were able to show all three of them were bogus,” Clarke said.

Ball said officials in the Business Office “unequivocally supported” the defense's assertion that Dukes was entitled to the reimbursements that she received, prompting the Travis County District Attorney's Office to dismiss 13 felony charges against her in October 2017. After Dukes paid reimbursement, prosecutors also dropped misdemeanor charges against her for alleged abuse of official capacity by a public servant stemming from her alleged use of legislative staffers to perform private tasks.

“She was convicted of nothing,” Ball said.

One of the Smyser Kaplan white-collar criminal defense team's biggest victories came in February 2016, when a New Orleans jury found Robert Kaluza, a former BP plc supervisor aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig, not guilty of a misdemeanor pollution charge arising out of the 2010 explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Don Vidrine, another rig supervisor, pleaded guilty and testified against Kaluza at trial.

Clarke said the Smyser Kaplan lawyers faced “a monumental task” preparing for the case. The defense team knew nothing about deepwater drilling and had to use targeted word searches to go through 91 million documents they received from the government, he said.

On the civil side, in October 2016, Smyser Kaplan partners Smyser, Jeff Potts and Justin Waggoner, representing the trustee for Black Elk Energy, obtained a temporary restraining order from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas that froze about $118 million in assets in the accounts of four hedge funds accused of illegally stripping assets from the energy company.

“When we finish, the amount the trustee could obtain is the whole amount fraudulently transferred, approximately $118 million,” Smyser said.

He said the Smyser Kaplan team also has entered into a number of confidential settlements with individuals sued in state courts.

In a potentially precedent-setting administrative case, Veselka tried a complaint at the Texas Railroad Commission in 2017 that raises the question of whether state law prohibits discrimination by a gas utility charging dramatically different rates for simultaneous gathering and related services to producers who own undivided interests in the same gas stream. Veselka said he is trying to cut the costs of his client, TG Barnett Resources, by about $23 million. The case remains pending.