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By Tony FlesorLAW WEEK COLORADO

IN MANY WAYS, BakerHostetler associate Mark Barron’s legal practice is a way of life.

The way he practices law has been in-fluenced by personal habits, and his habits have been influenced by the way he wants to practice law. He also built his practice around the location where he wanted to live, and he’s now carved out a niche for himself in a crowded field.

Barron, whose practice deals with en-ergy and government land use and regula-tions, has developed his own method of practicing law by creating his own personal oath of law. During new student orientation at the University of New Mexico School of Law, he was directed to write down his own philosophy for the practice of law. He said he still believes the things he wrote down then.

Things like promising to keep his trans-mission standard and his phone on silent have guided the way he still practices.

“Some of those little things that seem silly are, in my view, the kind of personality traits that make you good at the big things,” Barron said. “The phone is an example of politeness — showing to folks I’m working with that when I’m in a room with you, I’m actually paying attention to you, and I’m not distracted by other things.”

His oath’s declarations suggest personal discipline and patterns that promote suc-cess, he said.

Those guiding principles have worked out so far. Through the first eight years of his career, Barron has begun developing an expertise in public land use for energy com-panies, a small niche of a huge practice area.

He started down the path by decid-ing he wanted to live in the West as a law student at the University of New Mexico. He was fascinated by the subject matter of natural resources, but he also determined that it was a subject that would allow him to develop a life and a practice in the West.

Despite his Western ambitions, he soon found himself in Washington, D.C., in the first few years of his career with an honors attorney appointment at the Department of Justice’s environment and natural resources division, which he describes as the premier natural resources law firm in the country.

He said that opportunity gave him the

rare opportunity to work on major cases immediately after starting his career.

“By the time I had moved back to Colo-rado, about three years ago, I had five years of first-chair experience in cool, big, envi-ronmental natural resources cases,” he said.

Since moving to Colorado, he’s been involved in fighting a major legal develop-ment in the Bureau of Land Management’s rules regarding hydraulic fracturing on public lands.

He has worked with BakerHostetler partner Poe Leggette in representing the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance for comments on the proposed rule since spring 2013. Now, with the rule finalized and ready to be implemented this week, on June 24, he’s working on a lawsuit on behalf of the industry associations saying the rule oversteps the federal government’s authority.

Barron said he believes many of the procedural legal flaws in the rule relate to the BLM’s failure to understand the impli-cations in the field and not account for the record in the administrative rulemaking process that explained what the implica-tions on operations would be.

“I like to think of myself as objective on environmental issues — the more you learn about this issue, the stronger our position comes in on this particular case,” he said.

In developing his knowledge in the rule and its implications, he’s had the chance to prepare workshops on its effects and to meet the regulatory and engineering staff who will actually work in the field and be expected to implement the rule’s regula-tions. That has helped him develop more business by attracting three new clients who are IPAA members.

“We do take pride in understanding or trying to apply the legal concepts in a way that’s going to be meaningful for the techni-cal and business people who have to do the work in the real world,” he said. “That’s un-usual for lawyers, but it’s not unusual for us. We spend a lot of effort trying to do that.”

Barron is also making a name for him-self by meeting an item on his own career checklist next month when he will speak at the Rocky Mountain Mineral Annual Insti-tute in Anchorage. •

— Tony Flesor, TFlesor@circuitmedia.com

Mark Barron