The Offer: Which Texas Firm Should You Not Mess With?
Which Texas firm is the most Texas?
Texas is maybe the best deal in Biglaw. You’re making coastal salaries at flyover cost of living. You can do interesting work, as long as you are interested in helping men with big hats drink other people’s milkshakes. And it’s warm.
The downside of living in a featureless desert surrounded by fire ants and ex-high school football players are obvious, but if you live there you probably think that’s part of its charm.
But I feel like I understand Texas, and Texans, because they are most like New Yorkers in one regard: The people who live there really want it, own it, and accept no substitutes. You can take a boy out of Iowa and put him damn near anywhere and eventually he’ll adopt the image of whatever place he’s living in. But you can expose a Texan to the highest Parisian couture for ten years and he’ll still walk into a store and say “How much for the bolo-tie, s’il vous plaît?”
How Transactional Lawyers Can Better Serve (And Maintain) Their Clients
With that in mind, today’s offeree has chosen her bed already, all that’s left to decide is the color of the sheets:
Hey. So I’m a law student at University of Texas with a few offers.
Andrews Kurth – Houston
Haynes and Boone – Houston
Baker & Mckenzie – Dallas
K&L Gates – DallasI want to do transactional work — maybe corporate maybe not. Concerned about what fluctuating oil prices may mean for Houston firms now and in the future. Also concerned about K&L’s Dallas office losing a large number of people this year.
Yeah, I’m going to assume that she included K&L Gates Dallas to bait me into linking the article about K&L Gates Dallas imploding as part of her elaborate troll of K&L Gates Dallas. Well played, lady.
I proceed from two premises:
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1. Where you live is more important than where you work.
2. Houston is the worst big city on Earth.
Houston is like the combination of the worst thing about every other American city. Hot and swampy like D.C. or Miami, with L.A.’s pollution and urban sprawl, yet overcrowded like Chicago, full of God-fearin’ tight-asses from Dallas who hate poor blacks from New Orleans who in turn hate the wretched refuse of people who set out for New York and ended up in Houston. Houston is a J.J. Watt commercial, it’s a veneer of “good ol’ boy” lacquered over a corporate monolith. The only redeeming thing about the city is NASA, and if you think about it Mission Control is staffed with people who hate where they live so much they want to escape from the planet.
And of course a place like that is the biggest legal market in Texas. Of course the energy barons of our day stick their lawyers in a place like Houston, then cover it over with a blanket of smog so that nobody has to look at them. If you look at ATL’s list of top-100 Biglaw offices (do you see what I did there), the only Texas offices that rate are Houston offices because that’s where all the fees are.
But I’d go to Dallas. Dallas/Fort Worth may be the theme park version of Texas, but at least it’s a coherent city. Baker McKenzie is a huge firm that isn’t going anywhere. You’ll be safe there and relatively insulated from the EPA outlawing your client’s business plan.
If you are thinking about your career, you have to go to Houston (and we rank Andrews Kurth in Houston better than HayBo). But dad gummit you’d be giving up a lot of whatever makes Texas special to you to go live in Houston.
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JOE PATRICE
Today I’ve been saddled with the unenviable task of defending Houston. Thankfully, we’ve turned the degree of difficulty to its lowest level and I only have to fend off a challenge from Dallas.
Elie makes a few astute observations. First, Houston is absolutely a J.J. Watt commercial. Indeed, if you find yourself within a hundred miles of Houston all you’ll see are J.J. Watt commercials hawking everything from the local H-E-B to Summer’s Eve because he’s J.J. Watt and can sell any damn thing he pleases. Second, the only Texas offices in our law firm rankings are Houston firms. Of course that’s because we only ranked firms in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC., making it hard for Dallas to compete. Third, to quote our own Kathryn Rubino on the subject:
Is it me, or is someone seriously considering K&L Gates Dallas right now essentially saying (like Krusty the Clown) “I thought the Generals were due!“
Fourth, and most importantly, Houston is where the big professional opportunities are, which is why it’s frankly baffling that Elie is placing so much faith in “where you live” after railing against Cleveland Boy last week for potentially passing up top flight professional experience to move to the city of his choice.
In the interest of consistency, I’ll mirror last week’s advice that if you really prefer Dallas, that’s the right answer. But if you’re in any way ambivalent, you have to go to Houston and earn that experience. Dallas firms will be there down the road — as will San Antonio firms, Austin firms, or anywhere else you might want to go. This goes double if you actually do end up opting for a career in corporate work because you’re going to want to be where the in-house offices are to expand your down-the-line career opportunities. Elon Musk hasn’t built the economy Tesla yet, so oil and gas are going to be fine bets for a long time to come.
And you don’t have to sell your soul to oil and gas either. Surprisingly, Houston isn’t all about oil either. It boasts the largest job growth of a metro area and while many of these jobs may be “energy adjacent,” they aren’t all working at Exxon. For example, Houston is one of the bigger markets for tech jobs because energy companies have a plethora of tech support needs spawning a number of startups in the area. And there’s always the defense industry.
It’s this tech infusion that makes Houston far less of a cowboy paradise than Elie suggests. If you have the wherewithal to deal with some traffic, move up to The Woodlands with all the other Eastern Seaboard transplants and you’ll barely realize you’re in Texas until you order BBQ.
Dallas is a fine city. It’s got a soft blue sheen and all that. But it’s not the primary legal market in the state and you should go for that if you have the chance and I also prefer Andrews Kurth (with the usual caveats that you feel you like the people you met there more than those at Haynes and Boone).
As a wise woman once said, “H-Town, bitches.”
So, where do you think our reader should go?
Annie Oakley should go to:
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