Henry F.

O'Connor, III

Position: Partner
Office: Mobile

Henry O’Connor is a partner in the Corporate Practice Group. He also chairs the firm’s Hospitality Industry Team, leads the real estate practice, and serves as the firm’s director of strategic growth.

With deep experience in the legal, banking, and real estate sectors, Henry advises clients on a wide spectrum of complex property, infrastructure, and economic development transactions. He represents developers, investors, owners, operators, lenders, and borrowers in acquisitions and dispositions, ground-up development, joint ventures, and financings, with particular depth in transactions where real estate, energy, and economic development incentives intersect.

Among other engagements, Henry has served as counsel to the developer of a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center campus with the potential to scale to 1,000 MW of utility capacity. He also served as counsel in connection with two major sawmill projects: an approximately $210 million state-of-the-art complex in Axis, Alabama, which replaces an existing Mobile facility and retains roughly 130 jobs, and a $160 million greenfield complex in Beauregard Parish, Louisiana, projected to create 130 direct and nearly 400 indirect jobs. In downtown New Orleans, he has represented purchasers of two Class A office towers: 909 Poydras Street, a 36-story tower of approximately 545,000 square feet, and 1515 Poydras Street.

Prior to joining Jones Walker, Henry spent two decades in private practice, banking, and private investment. He co-founded a New Orleans law firm focused on commercial real estate and served for nine years as its managing member and name partner. In the financial services industry, Henry was executive vice president and director of corporate strategy at BancTrust Financial Group, Inc., and, following its merger with Trustmark National Bank, president of Trustmark’s Mobile market. On the investment side, he was managing director of IPC Capital Partners, a real estate private investment firm, and a partner in a select-service hotel developer in Louisiana. This combined experience gives him a strong understanding of how lenders underwrite a transaction, how investors evaluate it, and how owners and operators live with it long after closing.

A second thread runs throughout his career: strategic growth. After directing corporate strategy at BancTrust and co-founding and growing his own firm, Henry now serves as Jones Walker’s director of strategic growth, where he leads the firm’s lateral partner and group recruiting, evaluates new practice and market opportunities, and oversees the integration of incoming lawyers. He writes and speaks regularly on lateral strategy and professional development for younger lawyers.

Henry has been listed annually in The Legal 500 United States for Real Estate since 2020 and has authored the USA chapter on real estate trends and developments for the Chambers Global Practice Guide.

Outside the firm, Henry serves in leadership roles across the business and civic communities of the Gulf South, with a focus on economic and workforce development and education. He is the co-founder and past chairman of the board of Accel Day and Evening Academy, Alabama’s first charter school, and serves on the boards of several business, civic, and educational organizations.