About Oliva Gibbs

The OG Law Story

The story of Houston-based oil and gas law firm didn’t start in Texas. It began on top of Ohio’s Utica Shale.

I had just graduated and wanted a career in oil and gas. Not “energy law,” but real deal, upstream oil and gas law. In 2011, with the discovery of the Utica Shale by wildcatter Aubrey McClendon, Ohio had just emerged as the place to be. At least that’s what I thought at 24 years old. That is, until a professor told me, “If you want to be taken seriously in oil and gas, you need to go where the real action is. You need to go west, young man.”

As in, if you really want to be in oil and gas law, you must go to the Energy Capital of the World — Houston, Texas.

With that goal in mind, I put my butt where my heart wanted to be. I found a firm that was big in Texas but needed an Ohio lawyer to handle the Ohio boom — and that was me.

I always had an entrepreneurial streak. I started a few companies while in college and even upon moving to Houston. One I sold to a partner, and it is still operating today. Another didn’t fit what I wanted to do. But that desire to build something bigger than myself continued to burn. In 2013, I co-founded a lean oil and gas title and due diligence firm serving clients in Ohio, Texas, and New Mexico.

The next year I hired Brad Gibbs, an experienced Texas oil and gas attorney — and former punk rocker and resident of Japan — to double down on dirt law and expand markets. Brad cut his teeth in the drilling boom of the Barnett Shale and the acquisition frenzy in the Permian Basin. Brad and I saw eye-to-eye that success would come from fanatical client service, collaboration, and continuous learning (more on that later), and a true passion for the industry itself. We only wanted to have lawyers and team members that were proud to call themselves dirt lawyers. Not windmill or solar panel lawyers, but true oil and gas lawyers.

Most oil and gas attorneys know the law, but the best ones have a passion that keeps them learning about the industry and the history behind those laws. They’re not just legal guns for hire — they’re true partners with their clients’ in-house counsel. They don’t just think of themselves as lawyers who happen to serve an industry, they see themselves as part of the industry.

As we see it, if you just know title law, you don’t really know title law — you must understand litigation and transactions as well. And some engineering. And some geology. And some genealogy. And … well, you get the picture. You really have to understand the business fundamentals behind the transactions and litigation. There’s always a story that happens behind the scenes — when you understand the story, you understand the business. And this is why OG is known for being oil and gas history nerds as much as we are known for our fanatical client service.

By 2018, Brad became a partner and in 2022 we renamed the firm Oliva Gibbs. Brad’s mission? To architect an onboarding and learning process that would take competent, newly minted oil and gas attorneys and make then as useful to clients as seasoned attorneys. His goal was to make this faster than is possible with typical on-the-job training and to scale while keeping the soul of the firm intact.

The turning point happened during the COVID pandemic. When other firms were hunkering down, we decided to scale the firm. With this goal in mind, Brad approached me with the idea of hiring the top oil and gas law professor in the country to head up OG University. We built a platform at Oliva Gibbs dedicated to continuous learning within the firm and the oil and gas industry. We basically created an in-house oil and gas law school to ensure the best onboarding and training in the industry, including business skills and leadership training. OGU is where the rubber meets the road, transforming academic knowledge into real-world skills.

With that foundation in place, Brad and I called our shot: to become one of the largest and most respected firms specializing in dirt law. By 2023, we had lawyers working in every major oil basin in the U.S., including an office in Midland, Texas, smack in the center of the Permian Basin.

Today, the firm has 60 attorneys working across more than 15 states and six offices. But we still claim the illustrious Dirt Lawyer title, covering title, litigation, and transactional needs in upstream oil and gas.

Oliva Gibbs has earned national recognition by Chambers and Legal 500 as one of Texas’ top mid-sized law firms for Energy and Natural Resources work. We’re also on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies and have a Houston Business Journal Fastest Growing Company Award.

Not bad for an Ohio boy interested in oil and gas who partnered with a former punk rocker.

— Zack Oliva