Looking abroad, building for the long haul
For all of Houston’s newness – new high rise office buildings, new immigrants, new sprawling subdivisions, new medical breakthroughs – it’s easy to lose sight of the long history of many of the region’s businesses.
These pages have already chronicled the centennials of KBR and Halliburton and a century-old PR man, and this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, long known to Houstonians as Fulbright & Jaworski.
This week Mark Curriden of our reporting partner Texas Lawbook dives into the history of the firm, which launched here a century ago with a pair of lawyers and has since grown to become a global enterprise with more than 4,000 attorneys.
“The firm’s lawyers are directly responsible for the creation of the Texas Medical Center, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the University of Houston and the Houston Bar Foundation, which provides legal services to thousands of Texans annually,” Curriden writes. “Fulbright attorneys prosecuted war criminals, helped Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson defend his U.S. Senate seat while also running for vice president, saved Texaco from bankruptcy liquidation and, of course, led the Watergate investigation and prosecution of President Richard Nixon and nearly two-dozen of his appointees.”
Fulbright & Jaworski’s 2013 merger with London-based Norton Rose both expanded its reach and solidified Houston’s place as an international business center.
That evolution is something Keith Dalton, chief executive of design-build firm KDW has seen from the front lines.
His company, which handles every aspect of real estate development for clients from site selection through design and construction, has thrived in large part because of business flowing in from overseas. It also dates its history to the 1895 founding of a predecessor company.
“We have lots of German companies making everything from diesel engines for ships to drilling equipment to temperature vessels and gauges,” he tells contributor Danny King. “We have Dutch companies in the valve industry, packaging facilities from Vietnam, Japanese companies making cranes, building materials from Ireland, pipe and oil and gas materials from France, underwater umbilical cables from Poland and England.”
Why here, why now? Well, Dalton points out, Houston is on the verge of becoming the third-largest city in the U.S. “And it’s got a low barrier to entry, and there’s not a lot of government interference. … And there’s an abundant supply of available land at a good price. … And it’s also about quality of life. One of my German clients said they chose Conroe so that each of his employees can have a home with a garden and some elbow room.”
Finally, as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, columnist Chris Tomlinson gives us some food for thought.
The tide, he suggests, needs to turn when it comes to thinking about – and acting on – what we consume.
On this holiday, he points out, “about 40 percent of the adults sitting around the table will be clinically obese, as will be 18 percent of the children, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.”
The impacts of that are great. Tomlinson argues that we’re slowly killing ourselves through the dietary choices we make. Whether it’s the direct health implications of a fatty, highly caloric diet of the climate implications of the methane generated by all those gaseous cows, we’re doing ourselves in.
“Political candidates are debating how to fix the nation’s health care system, offering solutions ranging from socialized medicine to transparent pricing,” he writes. “But few have the guts to call out the American people themselves for being fat, dumb and dying.” Happy Thanksgiving! Welcome to Texas Inc.