Energy

Cases

• Served as lead trial counsel in a certified class action arbitration involving an oil and gas royalty accounting dispute.
• Representing an oil and gas company as post-trial and appellate counsel to defend a verdict of over $40 million in a complex commercial dispute involving an agreement to develop assets in Latin America.
• Served as appellate preservation counsel to a natural resources company for a jury trial in a commercial dispute with tens of millions of dollars in claimed damages.
• Won a published opinion for Crestone Peak Resources, protecting strategically important aspects of the company's original $900M investment and affirming the trial court's summary judgment rulings for WTO's client after Boulder County sought to invalidate several of the company's oil and gas leases.
• Successfully negotiated a class settlement—for 2.5% of the claimed damages—for a major utility provider and its subsidiary in a 15-year-old putative antitrust class action in Colorado federal court.
• Defending utility companies and equipment manufacturers in catastrophic fire and explosion cases resulting in major burn injuries.
• Represented a utility company at trial in Missouri in a case involving a maintenance worker who suffered loss of limb after electrocution while attempting to service a billboard. Settled for a fraction of the demand.
• Won a $1.25 billion exit fee dispute for an electric distributor against its generation and transmission provider. The groundbreaking decision followed one of the first remote trials in the nation in the COVID-19 era.
• Serving as lead counsel for natural gas company in antitrust class action alleging wholesale price manipulation and seeking damages in excess of $2 billion.
• Facilitated a rural electric cooperative's withdrawal from membership in a wholesale cooperative. WTO's client achieved settlement for hundreds of millions of dollars below the wholesaler's demand and can now acquire substantially cheaper and renewable green energy sources for its members.
• Represented a wholesale energy company in a multi-jurisdictional dispute with multiple counterparties, preserving tens of millions of dollars of contract value and a key long-term business objective for the client.
• Won a multimillion-dollar arbitration award for an energy company, recovering more than 15 times the last settlement offer made before trial.
• Won affirmance preserving WTO's trial court dismissal of a wrongful termination lawsuit involving the public policy exception to employment at will.
• Defeated class certification for BP in a natural gas royalties underpayment case heard in federal court in Wyoming.
• Won an arbitration award for future oil and gas royalties valued between $70,000,000 and $100,000,000 in a David v. Goliath case against a multinational oil company.
• Successfully represented employers in noncompete and trade secret litigation, including obtaining injunctive relief against a former employee of a solar power plant developer for violation of noncompete and nondisclosure agreements.
• Won a $4.2 million judgment for a renewable energy client in a civil trial involving an executive's embezzlement from the company.
• Won a jury verdict in Cook County, Illinois, for General Electric in an asbestos duty to warn case involving power plant land turbines.
• Obtained summary judgment for Lockheed Martin with regard to the majority of potentially $2 billion in exposure in a major federal False Claims Act case in Idaho. Allegations included false claims associated with a contract for management of the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Idaho Falls, ID. Following summary judgment, the remainder of the case settled favorably.