Three years into practicing law, Haynes Boone Associate Bradley Potts has joined Partner Jeff Nichols in teaching at the University of Texas School of Law. The Texas Lawbook published a feature piece detailing Potts’ journey back to college classrooms.
Read an excerpt below.
“Since first setting my mind to becoming a lawyer in high school, I worked hard to make that goal a reality, and it is still surreal sometimes to think that I am currently a third-year practicing attorney after going through the many obstacles necessary to become a lawyer,” Potts said.
However, since becoming a lawyer three years ago, Potts continued to feel the pull to teach and began looking for ways to incorporate it into his work. He found the ability to do so by supporting younger colleagues at Haynes Boone.
“I get the opportunity to constantly act as a mentor to younger associates, which I greatly enjoy, but I also enjoy teaching in a more traditional sense,” Potts said. So, when an opportunity arose earlier this year to do so, Potts felt he couldn’t say no….
Said Nichols: “I have been teaching this material to law firm associates for many years, and Bradley stands out as being uniquely able to understand the law of finance, which is very complex. He was my teaching assistant when he was a student at the law school, and I think I knew from that point he was destined to teach this material alongside me.”
Potts was ecstatic with the opportunity. And after an interview with the academic dean of UT Law, he was appointed an adjunct professor.
But Potts didn’t stop with the appointment. He proposed to both Nichols and the school a new approach to teaching a course on energy finance….
“We wanted the course to discuss the substantive tasks that junior associates are commonly assigned to work on in a transactional practice group. Given Jeff’s prior experience teaching an energy-specific finance course, we decided to generalize the course more into ‘Finance Practice Fundamentals’ with a focus on credit agreements and their ancillary documents that junior associates most commonly work with,” Potts said.
The dean met the proposal with enthusiasm, particularly because it would be taught by both an experienced partner in Nichols and a more junior associate in Potts, allowing the students to have a broader scope of the profession….
Potts and Nichols’s new class, “Navigating Credit Agreements: Finance Practice Fundamentals,” officially started at the beginning of UT’s Spring semester in January 2025. Since then, Nichols hasn’t regretted choosing Potts as his co-professor and feels that Potts has helped enhance the student’s overall learning and engagement with the course. …
“Lecturing as a professor and engaging with students on the material has also been very fulfilling and meaningful to me. Most of the students in our class are going to work in transactional groups at large law firms, so having the opportunity to educate them on the substance and practice of junior transactional work, having lived what I am teaching daily, is very rewarding,” Potts said, adding that Haynes Boone and his practice colleagues have also been highly supportive of his academic involvement….
“I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to serve as an Adjunct Professor at Texas Law, and the fact that I am able to do so as a third-year associate speaks to both Haynes Boone’s uniqueness as a firm supportive of their associate’s non-billable interests and the law school’s interest in providing novel and practical classes to their students,” Potts said.
Read the full article from The Texas Lawbook here.
