Babst Calland Opens in Texas, Merging With Oil and Gas Firm
The Pittsburgh-based firm brought on four lawyers from Chambers Law Firm in The Woodlands, near Houston.
June 05, 2019 at 04:29 PM
3 minute read
Les Chambers, Ryan Chambers, Coleman Anglin and Nataliya Tipton, Babst Calland. Courtesy photo
Pittsburgh-based midsize firm Babst Calland Clements and Zomnir has planted a flag in Texas by merging with the four-lawyer Chambers Law Firm in The Woodlands, near Houston.
Oil and gas attorneys Les Chambers, Ryan Chambers and Coleman Anglin are joining Babst Calland as shareholders, and Nataliya Tipton as an associate. Chambers will serve as managing shareholder of Babst Calland's new Houston office.
The addition gives 150-lawyer Babst Calland its southernmost office. The firm also has a presence in Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., as well as a second Pennsylvania office in State College.
Managing shareholder Donald Bluedorn II said the firm spent about eight months looking for a firm to merge with in Texas. He said Babst Calland had a number of existing clients in the Appalachian region that were also involved in oil and gas activity in the Permian Basin and Mid-Continent region, which includes Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“It didn't make sense to us to bootstrap our way into that by having Pittsburgh lawyers do work down there,” Bluedorn said.
Meanwhile, Chambers said his firm was looking to grow when Babst Calland started looking for a merger partner. He and the other three lawyers making the move handle all areas of legal and regulatory matters, particularly oil and gas, property and transactional law.
The Chambers firm had actually experienced growth when commodities prices initially dropped a few years ago, Chambers said, “because the larger firms weren't competing with us” on rates. But in late 2016 and early 2017, the firm began to pull back on its growth voluntarily, he said, to accommodate for its clients' slowing production.
“Once prices started rising again we started seeing more activity,” Chambers said. “We were at a point where we really needed to probably double in size.”
The two firms' leaders had known of each other for a while. Chambers and Babst Calland have some existing clients in common, Bluedorn and Chambers said, though they declined to name them.
Chambers said his firm's lease recently expired, so he is currently negotiating a lease on new space. That office will have room for more lawyers, Bluedorn said.
“Our expectation is over time we will grow,” he said.
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