The 2,600-lawyer strong Energy Bar Association, founded in the 1940s with its main focus on regulation, has now spread to cover Canada and other areas of the US. It has 21 committees dealing with issues including antitrust, transactions and ADR. Jason Lief of Jones Day says the present is ‘certainly a good time’ for energy lawyers. 

Rolling up your sleeves

Recently elected, he says: ‘The thing you can be sure of is, no matter how much anybody thinks about it and tries to come up with the perfect study to forecast what will happen, in five to 10 years you can be pretty sure it will be wrong. That inevitably means there are business deals that haven’t played out the way people wanted them to. Whether industry participants like it or not, that often means lawyers have to be involved.’ Source: Fuelfix