Homegrown Firm V&E Leads Big Law Blow-Ins on Texas Energy Deals

Vinson & Elkins leads all law firms in M&A energy work in Texas, even as much bigger global rivals gain footholds in the state.

The firm guided $30.3 billion worth of energy deals through the third quarter, edging out top rivals Kirkland & Ellis and White & Case in Texas, Bloomberg data shows. For example, it is helping Sunoco LP acquire Canadian fuel distributor Parkland Corp. for $9.1 billion, and Plains All American Pipeline LP to buy the gas liquids business of Keyera Corp. for $3.75 billion.

“Energy is never something we’re going to move away from,” John Grand, who co-leads M&A and private equity for the firm in Dallas, said in an interview. “Given that it’s such a large part of the economy in Texas, a large percentage of our partners will dabble in it in different ways.”

The data shows that the firm founded in Houston when Woodrow Wilson was president is holding its own—at least for now—against major interlopers with deeper pockets who got their starts in cities such as New York and Chicago. Texas has been a magnet this century for international law firms hungry to grab transactions in the booming energy business, and the growth plan for artificial intelligence data centers has intensified the competition.

Vinson & Elkins is counting on its roster of clients built over decades to stay ahead of the pack, said Theodore Borrego, an attorney and professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “But we’re seeing outside firms also starting to compete,” he said.

Kirkland did $29.9 billion worth of energy deals in the first three quarters in the state, just $200 million behind V&E, followed by White & Case at $28.5 billion, Sullivan & Cromwell at $23.7 billion, and Milbank at $22 billion, Bloomberg data shows.

Among those rivals’ big deals, Kirkland in April advised TG Natural Resources when it acquired a 70% interest in the East Texas gas assets of a Chevron Corp. subsidiary for $525 million. In August, White & Case advised NRG Energy Inc. on its loan agreement with the Public Utility Commission of Texas and initial funding for two natural gas units.

The Chevron Corp. headquarters, center, in Houston on Oct. 8, 2025.

Photographer: Mark Felix/Bloomberg

For more than a century, Vinson & Elkins, Baker Botts, and Fulbright & Jaworski—the Houston-founded firms known locally as “The Big Three"—built reputations as energy dealmakers in Texas. V&E’s energy ties to the state go back to 1920, when A.E. Humphreys, its first major energy client, struck oil near Mexia, Texas.

A century later, Houston’s legal market is competing globally. V&E partners credit Latham & Watkins’ opening of a Houston office in 2010 as the first national firm to penetrate the Texas legal market. Jaworski merged with Norton Rose in 2013, and Kirkland & Ellis arrived in the state in 2014 with the launch of a Houston office.

V&E held its own against the onslaught by working with alternative asset managers such as Apollo, Blackstone and TPG, which started making significant investments in traditional energy in the 2000s, said Grand. The firm invested earlier than its competitors “in places where a lot of the deal flow was going to come from, in terms of private capital clients, and kind of building up that practice,” said Lande Spottswood, a partner leading M&A and capital markets for V&E in Houston.

The firm is carving a place for itself in the energy M&A pecking order globally. Kirkland & Ellis topped global energy transactions worth about $48 billion in the first three quarters of this year, followed by Latham ($41.8 billion), Norton Rose ($38.7 billion), and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett ($35.7 billion), according to Bloomberg data. V&E advised on international energy transactions worth nearly $34.5 billion during the same time period.

Some partners believe it’s now grown beyond its origins in traditional oil and gas practice areas. The firm joined the race to capture a piece of the AI data center market in a state that offers available land, low-cost energy, and welcoming government regulations. It has also maintained a “robust” presence in the financing and tax credit market for renewables, said Kaam Sahely, a V&E partner based in Austin.

The firm’s “bread and butter” is “anything that you can touch and has some sort of revenue—a stable revenue—and it’s a real asset, including real estate,” Sahely said. “It’s not necessarily all energy.”

Grand said that in highly competitive Texas, V&E risks losing partners to competitors. Kirkland and other firms have tried to “pick off key partners,” he said, adding that he repeatedly refuses calls from firms seeking to open practices in Dallas.

“We’ve got a culture that’s unlike any other: we have fun,” Grand said. “You want to work with your friends, and you’re willing to ignore calls from other firms on a daily basis for sometimes double your compensation to move over because people are happy with who they work with.”