Depew Gillen Rathbun & McInteer

A general practice law firm in Wichita, Kansas

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Randy Rathbun Prevails in Rare Trespassing Case

August 6, 2021 By dgrm1

Phillips County jury sticks hog producer with $134,000 judgment in rare trespassing case

Filed Under: News

Welcome to New Partner!

January 26, 2021 By dgrm1

Wichita KS, January 1, 2021 – We are pleased to announce that William E. Dakan is now a partner in our firm. Joining our firm in 2019, Bill’s legal practice emphasizes business organizations and transactions, real estate, wills, trusts and estates and trusts administration, and tax and aviation law.

Filed Under: News

Diana Stanley

October 15, 2020 By dgrm1

Diana Stanley is a Wichita native and graduated from Newman University (B.A. History, 2017) and the University of Kansas (Juris Doctorate, 2020) where she earned the Environmental and Natural Resources Law certificate. While in law school she received the Hershberger Energy Law Award and came in second at the National Environmental Moot Court Competition.

Diana is a member of the Wichita and Kansas Bar Associations, the Young Lawyers Association, and the Wichita Women Attorneys Association. She serves on the KBA Diversity Committee and the Newman University Board of Trustees.

Filed Under: Attorneys, Uncategorized

Dylan Wheeler

October 15, 2020 By dgrm1

Dylan Wheeler joined Depew Gillen Rathbun & McInteer, LC upon graduating from law school. Dylan was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, and received his B.A. degree in English from Kansas State University in 2017. He then went on to Washburn University School of Law where he received his Juris Doctorate in 2020 and was admitted to the Kansas Bar that same year.

Dylan was a member of Kansas State University’s Mock Trial Team in college, a member of the Phi Alpha Delta Legal Fraternity during law school, and additionally served as Vice President of the Labor and Employment Group of Washburn. He also authored and published several award-winning legal articles as a member of the Washburn Law Journal. Among these include his article Kicking Em’ While They’re Down: The Alternative Case Against Caps on Non-Economic Damages in Kansas, wherein Dylan analyzed the Kansas Supreme Court’s historic 2019 decision in Hilburn v. Enerpipe that declared Kansas’s legislative caps on the amount a personal injury plaintiff could recover for damages related to pain and suffering as unconstitutional under the Kansas Constitution.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Best Lawyers in America

August 24, 2020 By dgrm1

Randall K. Rathbun is once again recognized in the 2021 Edition of Best Lawyers in America for his high caliber of work in the practice areas of Employment Law – Individuals and Litigation – Environmental. He has been recognized by his peers since 1995.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: employee protection

Welcome to New Partner!

January 17, 2020 By dgrm1

Wichita KS, January 1, 2020 – We are pleased to announce that Kurt A. Harper is now a partner in our firm. Joining our firm in 2019, Kurt continues to focus on commercial litigation and alternative dispute resolution. He represents clients across a variety of industries in a variety of fields, including business litigation, and real estate and construction litigation.

Filed Under: News

Best Lawyers in America

August 27, 2019 By dgrm1

Charles C. Steincamp is once again recognized in the 2020 Edition of Best Lawyers in America as Lawyer of the Year in Environmental Law. This is the sixth time he has received this recognition since 2014. He is also listed as a Best Lawyer in the area of Litigation–Environmental law.

Dennis L. Gillen, is a Best Lawyer in Arbitration and Mediation.
Randall K. Rathbun is a Best Lawyer in Employment Law – Individuals.
Kurt A. Harper is a Best Lawyer in Bet-the-Company Litigation and Commercial Litigation.

Filed Under: News

William E. (Bill) Dakan

January 1, 2019 By dgrm1

Bill’s legal practice emphasizes business organizations and transactions, real estate, wills, trusts and estates and trusts administration, and tax and aviation law.

Bill is a native of Wichita, and a graduate of Kansas State University (B.S. Accounting 1974) and the University of Kansas (Juris Doctor 1979). Before law school, Bill worked with KPMG Peat, Marwick, CPAs, in Kansas City, Missouri, earning his certificate as a Certified Public Accountant in Kansas. Bill is a member of the Kansas Bar Association, and Wichita Bar Association (past chair, Real Estate, Probate and Law Day Committees). He is a life member of the Kansas Society of Certified Public Accountants and member of the Wichita Estate Planning Council. Bill has spoken on business transactions, tax, estate planning and aviation law topics.

Bill participated in the Wichita Chamber of Commerce Leadership 2000 program. Bill previously served on the boards of Wichita Habitat for Humanity and Wichita Community Theatre. He currently serves on the Starkey, Inc. and Wichita Bar Foundation boards. Bill is a volunteer guardian ad litem with The ARC of Sedgwick County, and an adviser to Jayhawk Chapter 88 of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Bill and his wife, Libby, have three daughters. Bill is an instrument-rated private pilot.

Filed Under: Attorneys

Kurt Harper

January 1, 2019 By dgrm1

Kurt Harper practices primarily in the field of business litigation, including employment litigation, construction disputes, real estate matters, warranty claims, and securities fraud. Kurt also serves as a mediator and as an arbitrator, including having served on a number of panels for FINRA.

He is a native of Wichita, and attended the University of Kansas, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Russian Language and Literature (with honors) in 1976, and a Juris Doctor in 1979. He was included in the Order of the Coif for his class. Upon graduation, he returned to Wichita, and has practiced law here continuously since that time, as well as maintaining his proficiency in Russian.

Kurt is a member of the Wichita Bar Association, where he served as secretary-treasurer in 1986-87, and is a member of the Kansas and American Bar Associations. His community involvement includes serving on the Board of Directors for the Wichita Symphony Society for over 30 years, where he has held several offices, including President; and Rotary International, for which he has served terms as club President and Vice President for the Rotary Club of Wichita; the president of the U.S. section of the Russia-US Intercountry Committee; and will serve as the District Governor for Rotary District 5680. He has previously served on the Board for Episcopal Social Services, and on the Vestry for St. James Episcopal Church.

In addition to an AV rating from Martindale, Kurt has received other peer recognition, including designation as a Kansas “SuperLawyer” in the field of business litigation since 2006, and as a “Best Lawyer” in commercial litigation since 2007. For 2019, Kurt received a designation as “Lawyer of the Year” for “Bet-the-Company Litigation” from Best Lawyers in America.

Filed Under: Attorneys

The Curious Policy Implications of In re SemCrude: Do Crude Oil Markets Need a Volcker Rule?

September 10, 2018 By dgrm1

In the summer of 2008 the nation’s largest and fastest growing midstream crude oil purchaser, SemCrude, declared bankruptcy. SemCrude’s demise was not the result of a bear market—crude oil traded on the NYMEX at $147 per barrel the month SemCrude filed—but of its taste for risky options trading. The bankruptcy pitted the competing liens of thousands of unpaid oil and gas producers and royalty owners who sold their crude oil to SemCrude at the wellhead against those of SemCrude’s lenders and the claims of downstream purchasers. Producers from Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma claimed prior perfected security interests and statutory liens under various nonuniform state amendments to Article. These were adopted specifically to protect producers from the insolvency of crude oil purchasers. The Bankruptcy Court for the Federal District of Delaware, however, found none of the producers’ lien rights to be perfected under applicable law and awarded priority to SemCrude’s lenders. Producers and royalty owners were left holding the bag.

The dust has all but settled since the Third Circuit’s July 2017 decision in In re SemCrude, 864 F.3d 280 (3d Cir. 2017), affirming the Delaware Bankruptcy Court’s ruling and further awarding priority to downstream purchasers of the oil over the producers. Yet little has been written about the decision’s implications for the broader crude oil market. Only Oklahoma has acted to fix the flaw of its statutory lien identified in the litigation. And no one has attempted to reconcile the policy of the Third Circuit’s decision—preservation of the free, unencumbered flow of crude oil in downstream commerce—with the rights and expectations of upstream crude sellers.

This brief piece does not resolve the dilemma. It only hopes to frame the issue as a problem of systemic market risk like what ailed the financial sector preceding the 2007 financial crisis. As with the financial crisis, this problem may be solvable partly by restricting speculation by midstream crude oil and natural gas purchasers similar to how regulators restrict speculation by federally insured banks under § 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act, known as the “Volcker rule.”

A Snapshot of the Crude Oil Market
Crude oil’s path from underground to a gas tank involves many buyers and sellers. Mineral owners own the real property where the oil is originally in place. Because mineral owners generally lack the capital and expertise to extract the oil, they lease the land to specialized firms in exchange for a cost-free royalty, granting the lessee the right to produce and sell the oil. Oil producers contract with third-party purchasers to sell the produced crude. These buyers, called “midstream” companies, arrange for transportation of the oil (usually by pipeline) and sell it to downstream buyers to be refined and eventually retailed to end users. Midstream companies typically make a modest margin on transporting the product. At each step of the way sellers take the product on credit and make payment usually on the twentieth day of the following month.

Midstream companies commonly hedge the value of the crude oil in their transportation systems by acquiring put options—the right to sell the oil at a specified price on a future date—to ensure they don’t have to resell the oil for a loss. SemCrude, instead, sold call options giving the buyer the right to purchase oil from SemCrude at a specified price at a future date, essentially betting the price of oil would drop. In re SemCrude, 864 F.3d at 287. In an effort to grow profits quickly SemCrude took an enormous position in these options. As the price of oil kept rising SemCrude kept losing its bets and took additional loans to double down. It eventually buckled under margin calls. When it failed, SemCrude lacked the cash to pay producers for oil it purchased the previous month.

In re SemCrude in a Nutshell
Oil producers have endured midstream bankruptcies before. As a consequence, several oil and gas producing states (e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, and New Mexico) have laws giving producers a lien in crude sold to the first purchasers to secure payment. Texas and Kansas, for example, include a nonuniform provision in their versions of Article 9 granting producers an automatically perfected purchase money security interest in production. See Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 9.343; Kan. Stat. Ann. § 84-9-339a. Oklahoma law provides a statutory lien in favor of producers. 52 Okl. St. Ann. § 549.1, et seq. In the SemCrude bankruptcy, producers from these states asserted that liens perfected under their respective nonuniform state laws obtained priority over SemCrude’s lenders and downstream purchasers.

The Delaware Bankruptcy Court disagreed. Essentially the court found that under both Texas’s and Kansas’s versions of Article 9 perfection of the nonuniform PMSI was determined by the laws of the states where the debtors (SemCrude and its affiliates) were located—in this case, Oklahoma and Delaware. The drafters of revised Article 9 intend the uniform choice of law provision to eliminate uncertainty about how to perfect and where to file and search for financing statements. Neither Oklahoma nor Delaware adopted the nonuniform PMSI. Thus, the only means of perfecting the producers’ security interests was to file a financing statement in the central filing office of the debtors’ location; none of the producers had done so. As for the producers claiming priority under an Oklahoma statutory lien, the court simply noted the statute expressly subordinated the lien to Article 9 security interests.

The Third Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling and reasoning. For procedural reasons the appellate panel also held that the producers’ security interests and liens were subordinate to the rights of downstream purchasers of the crude oil that enjoyed status as buyers for value and buyers in the ordinary course. The most striking aspect of the Third Circuit’s opinion is its commentary on the nature of the downstream oil and gas market and the importance of keeping it free from sellers’ encumbrances. “The oil industry operates through sales on credit. . . . The industry thus uses the Conoco warranty that this oil is sold free and clear of any liens because it is a hard-to-trace, liquid asset that flows throughout the country.” Id. at 300. The court continued, “In sum, if any producer of oil tries to sell it subject to a security interest . . . that flows endlessly down the stream of commerce, it will be unsold. The Producers’ contention that a lien . . . follows oil from their wells to the gas pump does not make sense for this type of market.” Id. at 301.

The Volcker Rule as a Model Solution
On the one hand, producers and royalty owners shouldn’t have to bear the risk of purchasers’ insolvency unsecured. But on the other hand, assuming the Third Circuit’s logic holds, the free flow of oil in the downstream market depends on it being sold on credit unencumbered by liens and security interests. Resolving this dilemma requires addressing the source of the problem—the midstream firm’s insolvency. Crude oil and natural gas transportation companies routinely hedge the value of their crude oil to ensure they recoup their investment in it plus overhead and reasonable profit. But when does routine hedging become SemCrude-style speculation? According to Professor Emeritus Paul MacAvoy, it’s “[w]hen you have a large open short position and not enough physical barrels to cover your short when the contracts expire.” Another way midstream companies like Semcrude can get in trouble is to venture beyond mere futures contracts intended to hedge into call options intended to profit.

Dodd-Frank’s Volcker rule prohibits federally insured banks and their affiliates from engaging in proprietary trading and investing in hedge funds to limit the risk of failure of large financial institutions. The rule isn’t without critics both for its drafting and its unintended consequences. Regardless it is the intent of the rule more so than the rule as written that provides a model for regulating midstream crude markets. That intent, according to the rule’s namesake Paul Volcker, is to reduce systemic risk to the financial system by limiting high-risk trading activities by key banking institutions.

A federal rule designed to limit high-risk trading by midstream oil and gas firms would reduce the risk of their insolvency. It would thus mitigate the largest risk facing producers of oil and gas in terms of payment for their product. Accordingly, it would reduce the compulsion oil and gas producing states feel to protect producers and royalty owners through nonuniform statutory liens and UCC provisions that might clog the otherwise free flow of oil in downstream commerce. Oklahoma’s reaction to In re SemCrude, for example, has been to patch its statutory lien to prioritize it above Article 9 security interests. Other states are likely to follow suit unless a more efficient solution to systemic risk is found.

Joseph A. Schremmer
joe@depewgillen.com

Depew Gillen Rathbun & McInteer LC
September 4, 2018

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Crude Oil, oil and gas, Volcker Rule

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