The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to announce finalists for the 2021 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards who have done some amazing legal work and demonstrated extraordinary leadership during some definitely unordinary times. Today, we reveal Transaction of the Year finalists.
Futurist to GCs: Businesses Face Constant Chaos, Worker Mental Health Crisis, High Turnover and Declining Productivity
WNDYR CEO Claire Haidar’s presentation to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter was designed to be a cold, hard slap about the days ahead for most businesses. Companies today are fraught with constant chaos and face crisis after crisis. The workforce is increasingly unstable and is becoming less and less productive. Corporate leaders are trying to implement hybrid working conditions – efforts that she predicts will fail miserably. Bottom line: Business leaders face challenges today like nothing they have ever seen before.
Former Concho GC Heads to Bracewell
Travis Counts is the second former C-suite hire from a major oil and gas player this year. He has negotiated and closed transactions exceeding $75 billion in value over his career, which includes Concho’s $9.5 billion sale to ConocoPhillips that closed in January.
Magellan Midstream Exec Joins Sidley
Trent Bridges served as the lead lawyer on numerous mergers and acquisitions and other corporate matters for the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company.
Remembering Clarence Brown – General Counsel, Leader, Husband, Father, Friend, Fashion Guru
Clarence and Shonn Brown were married for 21 years and became one of the power couples of corporate law in Texas. He was the GC of Kronos Worldwide. She is the deputy GC of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a multinational personal care products maker. Last Friday, Clarence Brown died from complications from a head injury. He was 52. But the impact he had was immeasurable. The Texas Lawbook has an in-depth report.
DBJ: Q&A with Tasha Grinnell
Between bankruptcy, labor force reductions and navigating Covid-19, Tasha Leilani Grinnell has had a whirlwind experience at Neiman Marcus Group. Grinnell spoke with the DBJ about lessons learned over the last year and where Neiman Marcus Group is headed in the future.
Parkland Adds Jackson Walker Partner as Associate General Counsel
Brad Nitschke was the chair of Jackson Walker’s Covid-19 Task Force.
LyondellBasell Expands Disputes Group with Winstead Shareholder
The Dutch chemical company has added Andrew Edelman has senior counsel to handle disputes in the Americas.
Frost Bank Names New GC
Frost Bank clearly has a thing for lawyers at Haynes and Boone. The Texas bank has named former Haynes and Boone litigator C.E. Rhodes, who also practiced at Akin Gump and Baker Hughes, to be its new general counsel and corporate secretary. The Texas Lawbook has details.
Clean Energy Investment Firm Signs Former ExxonMobil Senior Counsel as GC
Katie Wiley said the opportunity to join a smaller, more nimble firm in the clean energy and renewables space was exactly what she was looking for.
Texas Capital GC Heads to a New Bank
Kelly Rentzel, former general counsel at Texas Capital, has a new job: general counsel of First Foundation Inc. The emerging California-founded financial services firm is moving to Dallas, and they’ve tagged Rentzel to help them grow. Natalie Posgate reports.
Scenes from the 2020 DFW/ACC Corporate Counsel Awards
Scenes from the 2020 DFW/ACC Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards held June 3, 2021 at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Big Winners at DFW Corporate Counsel Awards: Match, American Airlines, Chuck E. Cheese, Methodist Health, Toyota, Southwest Airlines and Susan G. Komen
In the first major in-person legal event since the advent of the pandemic, the DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook gathered with some of the top legal talent in Texas at the George W. Bush Institute to honor the best in-house work during an exceptionally difficult year. The Lawbook’s founder Mark Curriden has all the results of the 2020 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards.
And be sure to Click Here to check out our gallery of the event.
Kate Hayashi Helps American Airlines Navigate an Extraordinary Year
American Airlines Associate GC Kate Hayashi has faced some challenges during the past 25 years – TWA’s bankruptcy, TWA’s acquisition by American Airlines, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that involved two American jetliners, American’s bankruptcy and restructuring and American’s merger with U.S. Airways. But 2020 was a year unlike any other. But those challenges are why she is one of the most experienced lawyers in the airline industry today.
Zix’s Noah Webster and ‘Magical Creativity’
While most companies battened down the hatches in 2020 in order to weather the Covid-19 pandemic, Dallas-based global cloud-based cybersecurity and productivity solutions company Zix Corporation went searching for opportunities. “We decided that the most resilient businesses continue to grow and continue to build to grow, even under difficult or unusual situations,” said Zix Noah Webster CLO. Last July, Zix discovered the perfect acquisition opportunity – an Israeli-owned company called CloudAlly that focuses on cloud-based data backup and recovery for businesses.
Jason Shyung: Keeping Southwest in the Air During Turbulent Times
Southwest Airlines attorney Jason Shyung remembers his first trial. He met his client – the owner of a small Sherman construction company being wrongly sued by an employee – only two weeks prior to trial. “He could have lost everything,” Shyung said. But Shyung and another young lawyer prevailed in federal court. Six years later, Southwest Airlines called on Shyung in its own potentially devastating crisis, and the young lawyer again prevailed. This is his story.
Meredith Bjorck and Her ‘Super Powers’
Meredith Bjorck had a seat at the executive table at HMS for five years and she made the most of it. She resolved all significant existing litigation within the first two years. The company’s revenue increased more than 30%, net income climbed more than 300% and the company’s stock price climbed more than 200%. Last winter, in the middle of Covid, Bjork led the deal team in the $3.4 billion sale of HMS. But what a five years it was.
From Hippies and Shetland Ponies to Fritos and Class Action Wins – PepsiCo’s Leanne Oliver’s Lifetime of Achievement
From developing and implementing a cutting-edge medical leave policy and creating a groundbreaking management training program on sexual harassment to winning major class action lawsuits and leading strategic corporate acquisitions, PepsiCo Foods North America GC Leanne Oliver has spent the past 25 years having an enormous impact on the company’s 300,000 workers and the Texas legal community.
“Leanne has brought enormous value to the company and to the entire legal profession,” said former PepsiCo GC Larry Thompson. “No one really knows PepsiCo as well as Leanne.”
Arash Mostafavipour, New CLO at Tabani Group
The commercial real estate-focused Tabani Group has hired a new chief legal officer – former Capital One financial services division chief counsel Arash Mostafavipour. “I love deal-making and they are always doing deals and looking at new deals,” Mostafavipour said. “It is a fast-moving and acquisitive operation.”
Jim Phillips Helps Keep PMG “Growing and Successful” in the Covid Era
Less than two years ago, Fort Worth-based PMG hired Jim Phillips to create and build its legal department from scratch. He now supports all agency business units, which signs more than 200 media and real estate contracts a month. At age 34, Phillips regularly finds himself across the proverbial table from lawyers at Google, Apple and Facebook negotiating digital ad contracts in one of the fast-evolving business models in the economy. And he established procedures to ensure compliance with data privacy and FTC regulations – all during “an extraordinarily challenging year.”
CEC’s David Deck Already Had a Full Plate, then Came Covid-19 and Chapter 11
David Deck’s list of job responsibilities as vice president of legal and compliance at CEC Entertainment was pretty extensive pre-Covid-19. He supervised the litigation docket, oversaw labor and employment issues, handled franchising, contracts with suppliers, intellectual property and compliance issues for Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza restaurants. When the pandemic hit, Deck put together a database that tracks the latest federal, state and local regulations and health standards for the jurisdictions of CEC’s 741 restaurants. – a massive project that he undertook without being asked.”[David] lives, bleeds and breathes for this company,” said CEC GC Rudy Rodriguez.
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