Before joining Bonds Ellis, Austin held senior in-house roles at some of the most active operators in the country. At Apache Corporation, he served as lead counsel for the multiple business units, and later returned to manage a large litigation docket— ranging from routine commercial disputes to nine- and ten-figure causes of action across multiple jurisdictions. Between those tours, he was Marathon Oil’s lead counsel for its Bakken, Oklahoma, and Eagle Ford assets, handling acquisitions and divestitures, gathering and transportation agreements, land and regulatory work, and pre-litigation disputes.

Austin’s transactional range is unusually broad. He’s negotiated thousands of supply contracts, MSAs, drilling contracts, and technology agreements, built a midstream company from the ground up, and been involved in billions of dollars in debt facilities, acquisitions and divestitures, and upstream and midstream operations—all of the transactions and agreements that keep an energy company running.

Most recently, Austin served as Assistant General Counsel, leading commercial contracting and corporate governance for one of Texas’s most beloved and recognizable companies — where the same rigor that closes a PSA turns out to be exactly what a world-class brisket-and-sugary-nugget retailer requires. He began his career in Big Law: first at Haynes and Boone, representing lenders and borrowers on secured, unsecured, and mezzanine credit facilities, ISDAs, and volumetric production payments, and later at White & Case in its Project Development and Finance group, where he represented fossil-fuel, power-generation, and alternative-energy companies in acquisitions, divestitures, EPCs, and reorganizations.

Austin earned his law degree with distinction from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he was a student writer for the Iowa Law Review, and his undergraduate degree in history (with a minor in philosophy) from Brigham Young University.

Outside the office, Austin is a devoted college-sports fan, a competitive-minded pickleball player, and a committed fantasy football player.