Immensely wealthy families have been critical to the economy of Dallas, Mark Solomon said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast.

Solomon, now an M&A and private equity partner at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP and managing partner of the firm’s Dallas office, started his career there in 1985 at a firm that did a lot of work for the Hunt family; one of his partners still works for Hunt entities, he said.

The Texas economy was flush with oil money in the mid-1980s, but a decline in energy prices and the savings and loan crisis pushed the state into a deep recession. Dallas emerged in the 1990s with a much more diversified economy and a group of private equity sponsors, many of which were seeded by the Bass family, most notably TPG Inc. (TPG).

The city also has several family offices, which have evolved over the past generation, when many “were almost side investments,” Solomon said. “Over time they found that if they were going to compete for private equity investments, they had to compete for talent; they had to be institutionalized in how they compensated individuals and how people moved up.

One of my larger clients is a family office. They look and act like a private equity firm, but they have the advantage of not having definitive hold periods.”

Listen to the podcast with Mark Solomon below:

More podcasts from The Deal are available on iTunes, Spotify and on TheDeal.com.