Tell us about your top U.S. Supreme Court or federal appeals court victory over the past year and how you and your team achieved the win.

Apache Deepwater v. W&T Offshore: Our first step in winning on appeal was winning a $43.2 million jury verdict in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas and a $48.7 million judgment. On appeal [in the Fifth Circuit], we focused on W&T’s fact-based arguments and its attempts to avoid controlling law. We wrote a powerful brief, prepared and mock-argued. We discredited W&T’s discussion of the background facts by highlighting evidence about Apache’s safe, reasonable and effective decommissioning of risky offshore deepwater oil wells. We defeated W&T’s argument that judicial precedent was not binding in a civil law jurisdiction like Louisiana, and we showed that the Louisiana Supreme Court’s on-point precedent supported Apache’s win.