Uisdean has over 40 years of experience in the world oil industry. After finishing Scottish legal studies in 1983 (University of Edinburgh 1978 – 1983), he went on to study Petroleum Law at Louisiana State University (LSU), Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After qualifying to practice in Scotland and Louisiana, Uisdean went on to work with a top New Orleans law firm for five years, mainly doing US oil and gas (1987 – 1992). In 1992, he joined City of London law firm Clyde & Co, spending short periods in London and Buenos Aires before starting a new oil and gas transactional practice in the freshly opened Clyde & Co, Caracas. This coincided with the very significant Venezuelan Oil Opening, which began in 1992 and lasted throughout the nineties until the assumption of power by Hugo Chavez in 1999. In 1997, Uisdean became the founder of the new Caracas office of Canadian law firm Macleod Dixon. From four lawyers in 1997, Macleod Dixon became a dominant law firm in Venezuela. Leaving Caracas in 2001, Uisdean was sent to open the new Macleod Dixon office in Rio de Janeiro. 

After two years in Brazil, Uisdean returned home to Scotland to begin a new oil and gas practice. He became Head of Oil & Gas at Maclay Murray & Spens LLP in 2004. From a standing start, Uisdean had created a formidable oil and gas team by the time he left MMS in 2013. Uisdean became an oil and gas partner in Bond Dickinson LLP (2013 – 2017), and he joined Aberdeen-based Ledingham Chalmers LLP as Head of Oil & Gas in early 2018. He founded VassPetro in September 2020.

In 2007, he won the accolade of Scottish Corporate Lawyer of the Year at the Scottish Law Awards.

Uisdean Vass Q&A

What inspired you to pursue a career in oil and gas?

I was a teenager in the North of Scotland of the 1970s and I witnessed the sheer excitement of the coming of Big Oil, the “Rigs of Nigg” and the cultural environment of “Local Hero”. I remember visiting Aberdeen for the first time in the summer of 1973, and the expectation was just palpable. Compare the state of Union Street today. Studying law in Edinburgh University in 1982, I was given the idea of doing oil and gas law in the US by watching an episode of “Dallas” which involved oil and gas lawyers. My father had spent a lot of time as a naval able seaman in the US during the Second World War, and this also drew me to the US.

How did you embark on your oil and gas law career?

Graduating from Edinburgh with an honours degree in 1982, I decided that I wanted to see the wider world, and I applied to do oil and gas law graduate courses in the US. I was a bit naïve about the process; I thought that a specialist graduate law degree would guarantee employment. I was fortunate to get a scholarship-supported offer to study for an Oil and Gas Law LLM at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. LSU was and remains one of the leading energy law schools in the USA, and I will be forever grateful for the sheer quality of the education offered. I was able to study both US and UK oil and gas law and subjects like international law and law of the sea. My thesis was written on a “Comparison of Offshore Oil Law in the US and the UK during the Reagan and Thatcher Administrations” which remains probably my most interesting ever project. I graduated in 1985, a year in which I also passed the Louisiana State Bar. My thesis won a national award and was published in the University of Tulsa Law Journal.

How did your career develop?

I returned to Louisiana in 1987 to spend five years working for the top law firm Stone Pigman, based in New Orleans. My main project was to work as a member of a large team bringing suit against Texaco on behalf of the State of Louisiana for royalty fraud and royalty underpayment. As with LSU, I am deeply grateful for the superb training offered by Stone Pigman. In 1992, after spending some time in London and Argentina, I joined Clyde &Co as a business associate dedicated to oil and gas in their new Caracas office. In 1997, I formed the Caracas branch of Calgary-based Macleod Dixon, which I regard as another excellent career highlight. Until Chavez won power in I999, I had lived through the great Venezuelan “Apertura Petrolera” (Petroleum Opening) and had seen and participated in multiple fascinating projects. I married my lovely Venezuelan wife, Shirley, in 1996, and in 1999, we had a son, Liam Uisdean Vass. In 2001, Macleod Dixon sent me to Rio de Janeiro to open a new office for the law firm. 

In 2003, I returned to Scotland, and a year later, I became Head of Oil and Gas in Maclay Murray & Spens LLP(MMS), one of the “big four” Scottish law firms, only one of which now survives in independent form. I worked in that role for nearly ten years, beginning a new UK practice (both offshore and onshore) and starting a new international practice (mainly focused on Africa and Asia). This was another very successful period. I won the Scottish Corporate Lawyer of the Year Award in 2007 at the Scottish Law Awards.  In 2013, I went on to become a partner first in UK firm Bond Dickinson LLP and then Ledingham Chalmers LLP. I have been Aberdeen-based since 2003.

In 2020, I began a new life as Managing Partner of VassPetro Limited, which is my own legal consultancy company. My wife, Shirley, who is also a lawyer, is a shareholder and director in VassPetro with me. I have to say that I was apprehensive at first, but she was always confident. What would it be like not knowing what our monthly income would be, and how would we structure and run the business? Thankfully, with a great deal of providence and a lot of hard work, things have turned out well. We also get by with a little help from our friends (about whom more below…). We feel a fierce pride in the business that bears our name.

What does your company do, and what sets it apart? 

The focus of VassPetro has always been to provide top-level oil and gas legal services to small and medium-sized oil companies, whether they are operating in the UK or internationally. Oil and gas deals are at the heart of what we do, and our ideal projects are advising on asset (and sometimes corporate) acquisitions/divestments using farmout agreements, asset sale & purchase agreements and the corporate equivalents. However, we also advise oil companies on the so-called commercial contracts, such as JOAs, TPOSAs, etc. With a huge experience of some thirty petroleum jurisdictions (including the UK), we can benchmark what is acceptable and beneficial. In the context of the UK in particular, we provide specialist regulatory advice in areas such as third-party access to infrastructure, decommissioning, climate litigation and the system known as maximising economic recovery (MER). Beyond traditional upstream E&P, we are now also providing expert legal witness support, and we advise on oil and gas supply chain contracting. 

We are very willing to use our extensive cultural and linguistic abilities, including fluency in Spanish and Portuguese, to benefit our international oil industry clients. 

We pride ourselves on being masters of contract law and of regulatory matters. While not being scientists, we are well-educated laymen as far as oil industry operations are concerned. We are very “fleet-of-foot”, offering high-value but very competitive specialist services. We are very active in academic work, in the Association of International Energy Negotiators (AIEN) and in commenting/presenting on oil industry matters. We have close relationships with the University of Aberdeen and RGU, and other universities in the UK and beyond. We really prize independence of thought, and we won’t accept hype. My vision is that if we had a military equivalent, it would be as a special force. Our best advertisement is the people we work with. (see our commendations at https://vasspetro.com/testimonials/). 

Describe your collaboration with Holt Energy Advisors

Soon after I founded VassPetro,I met up with Chris Starling, who is the Managing Director of Holt Energy Advisors. Holt is a commercial consultancy providing various services mostly to oil and gas clients, mainly in the realm of M&A, economic analysis, hydrocarbons sales, etc. Chris had the idea that Holt could offer legal services as a new service line, with me being the legal consultant. I was intrigued by the idea and was attracted by Chris’s assurance that, subject to conflict limitations, we could continue to service existing clients independently. I have been working to serve the needs of Holt clients since 2022, and the arrangement has worked out really well. We get access to Holt clients at good rates, creating a revenue stream also for Holt and allowing them to offer a better, more global service. They are constantly motivated to look for new legal work. It is a genuine win-win. I also really like the fact that I am working together in a multi-talented collaborative team, and we can provide lots of support and information to one another on a good-faith basis. We have worked extensively in the West of Shetland and the Central North Sea projects as well as international jurisdictions such as Namibia and Iraq. 

It really has been a great relationship, and long may it continue. 

Do you work with other professionals closely, and are you looking to grow VassPetro?

I do work together with other professionals very closely, without the explicit economic relationship which has developed with Holt. Notwithstanding that, my professional friends are absolutely vital to VassPetro. I think of a senior female oil and gas lawyer who has constantly supported me with excellent ideas for a decade or more. Or the oil and gas accountant and technical advisor who has been a close friend for nearly twenty years. Or the senior university lecturer who is always ready to listen to my latest crazy idea. And so many others. They have contributed so much. They know who they are! Thank you all so much!

While we have entered into a consultancy agreement with a senior lawyer who is a corporate specialist, it is not our real intention to grow VassPetro in terms of people but rather to grow it in terms of revenue. I am someone who really enjoys my work and loves my industry, and I have no intention of retiring until the Almighty makes his disagreement clear.

What have been some of your favourite work projects?

My largest single project was probably the suit against Texaco mentioned above for the State of Louisiana. The suit was for US15 billion. Prescription does not run against the State of Louisiana, and we were litigating claims arising from the 1920s onwards. It was a lesson in how a gas jurisdiction develops, with gas starting out as a waste product in the 1920s but ending up at US$10 per MCF in the 1970s. It was a history of the State.

Also during my time in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to try an admiralty case in the Eastern District of Louisiana, brief the case on appeal to the Fifth Circuit, and finally brief the case to the US Supreme Court. Certiorari was denied, and we failed to have our day in DC! But what an education! 

I found the Venezuelan Reactivation Rounds (1992,1993, and 1997) to be fascinating, and I represented many of the bidders. The 1997 risk contract was one of the most complex granting instruments which I have ever seen anywhere. All of these contracts were overridden by Hugo Chavez.

In 2003-2004, when I was just newly back in Scotland, I became responsible for doing the due diligence on more than 60 major maintenance and subsea contracts and hard prospects which were required in the takeover of ABB’s offshore business by an Equity Club. This lasted for about a year and was a brilliant education in supply chain contracting.

My all-time favourite farmout was a project located in the Joint Development Zone of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. The first FOA was between two oil companies, but a further major transaction was needed to raise funds for drilling. It took some four years and multiple negotiations to turn a simple two-way FOA into an immensely complex four-way FOA. I was sweating to the end!

What important lessons have you learned over your long experience?

• Believe what your own eyes are telling you. 
• Always take the simplest approach to everything. Be sceptical of complex top-down solutions. 
• Also, be sceptical of people who assure you that something is inevitable. What is inevitable in one decade will be impossible in the next. 
• Where is Peak Oil now? 
• Look at what people do rather than what they say.
• The most powerful vote anyone ever cast was cast with their feet.
• Value quality over quantity (within reason).
• You are only as good as your last project. 
• It is easy to lose clients but very hard to make them. 
• Be gentle with people but not with bad ideas.
• The same bad ideas keep turning up like bad pennies. 
• Lies run halfway round the world before the truth even starts the race.
• Read the small print. 
• It finally comes down to you.
• Take great pride in any real quality which you bring to another person. Quality makes the world go round, and it only comes through hard work.
• People fail to learn from past mistakes and do not learn from the achievements of others. 

Where is the energy business going in the future?

The world needs cheap, abundant, scalable energy. Without that, we have no civilisation. And people the world over will not give up their hopes of a decent life. Energy use is going to rocket in this century. The use of fossil fuels is remorselessly rising in absolute terms. There is, if anything, only an “Energy Addition”. Young people can still look to the petroleum business for future opportunities in international terms, even if the industry is suffering right now in the UK.

VassPetro

VassPetro provides specialist oil and gas legal services to oil companies, the supply chain, financiers and regulators wherever they may be, whether UK-based or international. Drawing on some thirty-five years of upstream experience, and having worked on petroleum projects in all of the World’s continents (except Antarctica!), VassPetro offers independent and balanced thinking, deep industry knowledge, goal-driven negotiation, incisive drafting, and fleet-of-foot performance.

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