Gibson Dunn Grows Texas Roster with Simpson Thacher Hire

Gibson Dunn & Crutcher is furthering a bet on its Houston office as the firm picks up Simpson Thacher & Bartlett investment funds partner James Hays.

Hays will launch Gibson Dunn’s fund formation practice in the office while he also focuses on advising private sponsors on strategic acquisitions and other components of alternative investment management.

“It’s providing this one-stop shop in Houston for these clients, which really has only existed in a very, very limited kind of number of firms,” Hays said in an interview.

Launched in 2017, Gibson Dunn’s Houston office has grown to over 60 lawyers. The office last month added former U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa, who serves as the co-chair of the global trial practice group.

Hays began his career at Simpson Thacher and is a former vice president of Blackstone’s real estate group. He spent more than five years at Simpson Thacher in Houston.

His work includes representing sponsors in the energy, infrastructure, buyout, real estate, debt and secondaries space. His clients have included BC Partners, Blackstone, First Reserve, GSO, Macquarie and Stonepeak.

Gibson Dunn’s push into private equity, including the transactional side, with hires in Houston and London also helped lure him to the firm, he said. The firm’s expertise in enforcement and litigation also presented a “great opportunity” to serve his clients, Hays said.

The firm has advised on 79 private equity deals worth $60.6 billion so far in 2022, ranking it among the top 10 advisers by volume on global private equity deals, according to Bloomberg data.

On the transactional side, the firm has worked on 148 deals worth $130.7 billion in 2022, placing it among the top firms for global deals announced by volume by principal, the data showed.

Houston Hiring

Gibson Dunn opened its Houston office with a focus on serving the oil and gas industry, whether it was capital markets, finance, corporate securities or mergers and acquisitions, said Michael Darden, partner-in-charge of the office and chair of the firm’s oil and gas practice.

However, in 2020 the firm began looking at other, “industry agnostic” practices, Darden said. It added a real estate and technology M&A practice, as well as private equity, which dovetailed with the broader effort across Gibson Dunn to expand in that area.

It picked up Jones Day private equity partner Stephen Olson as head of its private equity practice in Texas in late 2020. This March the firm added Michael De Voe Piazza, co-head of Willkie Farr & Gallagher’s energy practice, as co-head of the firm’s US private equity practice, along with several other lawyers from Willkie.

“We’re still hiring, we’re still actively recruiting,” Darden said. “We do know that there’s some economic headwinds that companies will be facing and that means our clients will be facing. But we haven’t seen that affect our practices yet.”

Hays move to Gibson Dunn was brokered by Sabina Lippman and Mark Jungers, co-founders of global legal recruitment firm Lippman Jungers Bala.