Texas State Capitol and flag in Austin (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

Continuing its steady expansion, Mississippi-based Butler Snow has boosted its litigation strength in Austin with four lateral hires from Beck Redden and one from Bowman and Brooke.

Christopher Cowan, Eric J.R. Nichols, Amanda Taylor and Karson Thompson joined Butler Snow in Austin on Jan. 2, coming from Beck Redden. Cedric Evans joined the firm on Dec. 3 after leaving Bowman and Brooke. Nichols and Evans were partners at their former firms.

Ryan Beckett, a Butler Snow lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, who chairs the firm's litigation  department, said Austin is a strategic growth market for the firm, and the firm is focused on  adding litigators.

“We have clients demanding we have service offerings in Texas. We have a foothold with Gary Davis and Katie Fillmore in products liability in Austin. Eric and his group allow us to expand into commercial litigation, internal investigations [and] white-collar,” Beckett said.

Mississippi-based Butler Snow moved into Texas in 2016 with offices in Austin and Dallas. With the latest lateral hires, the firm has seven lawyers in Austin and two in Dallas. Donald Clark Jr., the firm's chair, said the slow growth in Texas is not out of character for Butler Snow, because the long-term strategy is to get the “right people” for each office.

“We are not the kind of firm that necessarily goes in and hires a large group of lawyers. We kind of like to add onesies and twosies,” Clark said.

Clark said Butler Snow has added more than 50 lawyers over the last year in various offices, in a similar measured way. According to information provided to ALM for the NLJ500 Survey, 16 of Butler Snow's offices had five or fewer lawyers in 2017.

“What we normally do is go into a market and just add one here and one there, a group of three or five, whatever the case may be, that's normally how we have grown,” he said.

Clark said the 363-lawyer firm's largest-ever acquisition was in 2012, when 37 lawyers joined from Miller & Martin in Nashville. The firm's 26 offices are primarily in the South, but they include Hong Kong, London and Singapore.

Clark said Butler Snow intends to grow more in Austin, noting that a large client in the insurance business has asked the firm to beef up its Texas presence. The firm is close to signing a long-term lease in the city for a larger amount of space, he said, and is pursuing other potential lateral hires. Clark also wants to add public finance lawyers in the Lone Star State because that's a nationwide practice for the firm, he said.

But when asked about Houston, Clark said the firm has no immediate plans to add a third office in Texas, though it has talked to some lawyers in there. More immediately, the firm is looking to add new offices and lawyers in Florida and South Carolina, said Clark, who is finishing his last year as chair. The firm also made two recent two hires in Nashville.

Nichols, one of the new Austin hires, said he's worked with lawyers from Butler Snow for many years—since he returned to Beck Redden in 2011 after a stint as deputy attorney for criminal justice in the Office of the Texas Attorney General—and looks forward to working with them.

He declined to identify his clients, noting that he not only handles litigation, but also does “investigatory and white-collar work that hopefully doesn't become public.”

David Beck, a partner in Beck Redden, did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the departures from his firm. Mary Pawelek, executive managing partner of Bowman and Brooke's Austin office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Evans' departure.

Further Reading

Mississippi Firm Opens Dallas, Austin Offices

A Transformed Butler Snow Re-Elects Its 68-Year-Old Leader

Miller & Martin Lawyers Exit En Masse in Nashville Shake-Up