Jules S. Brenner

Jules Brenner serves as the co-chair of Clark Hill Strasburger’s Oil & Gas practice.  He represents privately held companies engaged in upstream activities (exploration and production, and the buying and selling of oil and gas leases, wells, minerals, royalties, and other production-based interests), midstream services (transportation, storage, and terminaling, and the marketing, trading, and exporting of crude oil), and oil field service companies that supply operators with equipment and services.  Jules regularly advises his clients in transactional and corporate structuring, corporate mergers and acquisitions, asset acquisitions and divestitures, private placements of debt and equity, private equity financings, and corporate governance matters.  Jules acts as outside general counsel for many of his clients.

Prior to becoming an attorney and joining Strasburger, Jules was an executive for over 20 years with a number of privately held oil and gas exploration and production companies. Jules' work during this time included senior management and advisory roles, including direct involvement in numerous private placements of equity and/or debt, and analyzing, structuring, and negotiating the sale, purchase, and development of tangible and intangible oil and gas related assets.

EXPERIENCE

• Outside general counsel to one of the largest gathers and marketers of crude oil in the Permian Basin.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the sale of an upstream service provider to a foreign-based portfolio company of a Texas private equity firm.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the sale of a compressor company based in the Permian Basin to a private equity-backed portfolio company.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the sale of a service company based in Houston to a private equity-backed portfolio company.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, a $200 million private equity commitment for client.
• Negotiated and drafted complex agreements on behalf of an oil and gas producer with a private equity group providing debt funding for overhead and drilling of wells in California.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the purchase of a 50 percent interest in two oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, a complex sale of partnership interests, including division of oil and gas properties and interests in future income, and contribution of oil and gas leases and assets, to new private equity funded company.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, a complex tri-party joint development and operating agreements in connection with exploration and development of a 700,000 acre concession in Columbia.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the purchase of non-operated working interests in 214 producing wells in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana.
• Documented, and helped negotiate, the sale of over 26,000 net mineral acres in Southeast Texas, including a complex exchange of non-participating royalty interests involving such minerals and over 40,000 other net mineral acres.
• Structured, negotiated, and documented the acquisition of over 10,000 net leasehold acres in the Utica Shale in Ohio.
• Structured, negotiated, and documented the purchase of leasehold interests in 60,000 undeveloped leasehold acres in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.
• Structured, negotiated, and documented a three-party transaction involving the simultaneous acquisition and sale of 5,000 net mineral acres in the Utica Shale in Ohio.
• Structured, negotiated, and documented a three-party transaction involving the simultaneous acquisition and sale of producing and non-producing properties in East Texas.
• Handled purchase from U.S. Bankruptcy Court of a waterflood project in West Texas.

Presentations

• The Art of the Deal: Evaluating, Allocating, and Mitigating Risk in Oil and Gas M&A Transactions, North American Petroleum Accounting Conference (Spring 2012)