OG Talks: Good Energy – Driving Louisiana Energy

My name is Joey Manning. My day to day activities involve kind of handling our projects, entitled opinions, transactional work, some litigational matters, assisting attorneys out of our Louisiana office, here in the Houston office.

My name is Patrick Schenkel. MindMate day to day is managing clients and attorneys on my team, answering questions from clients, making sure projects are managed. We’re getting projects delivered and turned around to clients on time.

The work that we consistently do for clients in Louisiana is mainly in the Haynesville. We have work that we’ve also done in the Austin Chalk and in some South Louisiana plays as well. But the bulk of it is North Louisiana, Northwest Louisiana, I should say, and the parish is in that area.

As we previously mentioned, Louisiana is different than all other states with with not just with regards to oil and gas, but lots of other things. But, since our clients are mostly calling about oil and gas, sometimes it requires us to teach them and explain to them the differences in the law, in Louisiana versus that of Texas or North Dakota or wherever else they’ve dealt with and and that it’s a constant teaching moment, I guess. We’re constantly teaching.

So we are we’re learning as well, but we’re educating others.

We’re also we’re constantly helping our clients from cradle to grave is kinda how we like to think of it from the minute they acquire these assets to mess necessarily when they’re finished drilling them or they’re finished producing them or they sell them. We are trying to help them grow alongside us when we’re trying to grow as well. Yeah. We’re constantly in collaboration with each other. We constantly wanna make sure that we are delivering a consistent, great, excellent work product to the client. Part of that is making sure then that if we are handling an issue one way for on one matter, that we wanna handle that on the same way for other clients and for other projects that we’re doing for maybe one particular client.

And so the to do that, we need to work with each other, let each other know the issues we’re seeing, why we think the answer may be what it is, and having a productive conversation about how we’re reached that answer and why we think that is the correct answer.

You know, while we have our way of doing things, we do cater, to each client.

And so, you know, we always wanna keep that in mind. Every client’s different and their needs are different and our goal is to meet those needs. And sometimes that involves changing the way we do things a little bit and, and we are always happy to do that to help our clients.

Yeah. There’s no one size fit all answer for every client. Some clients want things in particular ways, and we wanna make sure, again, that we are striving to deliver the best work product that fits for that client. And so we also need to make sure that we’re taking into mind what their needs are, what their purpose, what’s best for them, when we’re delivering work product to them?

Yeah. How knowledgeable they are of Louisiana law, how much we need to how much information we need to provide them is for, you know, background and things of that nature.

Our Louisiana office, despite despite the fact that they are hundreds of miles away, CLE collaborate with that office on a day to day basis, sometimes multiple times a day.

We live and breathe our core values every day, especially in Lafayette. We try to make sure that those values are instilled in that office and in each of those co workers.

The values are not in a per office sort of situation it is firm wide.

The main reason for NAEP was originally to get oil and gas companies together for for the purposes of making deals, selling, buying, things of that nature. What it seems to have turned into, it’s a place for for networking, getting in touch with people that you haven’t seen in a while or for years. It’s it’s a large industry, but it’s a small world at the same time.

Nate provides an excellent platform for us to meet with clients that we don’t regularly see all the time. A lot of our clients are not located in Houston, or even in Louisiana near our office there. So our clients are located in Dallas. They may be in Midland. And so Nate provides a great venue for us to get together with those clients, check-in with them, have conversations in person that maybe we’re not able to have over Teams and Zooms and phone calls, when we meet with them regularly.

So it just provides that great platform.

Seeing our clients at NAEP is that, again, we always have a named you know, you’ve heard of the term put a face to a name.

However we already kind of have that with Teams and Zoom and all of those things however there’s no real personal relationship that comes from that so seeing someone in person seeing your client in person solidifies that relationship a bit more and makes it a bit more personal instead of just professional. I don’t know. It’s we’re always professional, but when you’re in a professional setting, it’s only shop talk, so to say. And being able to expand beyond that allows for more comfort on both sides. Someone comes across an issue at another firm, they you could talk to them. Sometimes, they can tell you to watch out for something and and things of that nature. So it’s incredibly helpful in that regard.