Premium-Only Content: Theresa Terrell discusses what she’d do if she won the Powerball lottery tomorrow and shares pet peeves regarding outside counsel.
Hines Real Estate’s Theresa Terrell is 2022 Houston Senior Counsel of the Year
Theresa Terrell was a rookie litigator at Jackson Walker when she realized the trial practice was not a good fit for her and a partner at the firm
encouraged her to try real estate. “I still remember the first project I worked on was reviewing leasing in connection with a portfolio acquisition of office buildings, and I never looked back,” she said. “I love that real estate transactions can feel non-adversarial – deals can get contentious, but both sides ultimately want to get to a mutually beneficial outcome.”
Sixteen years later, Terrell is still in the real estate law practice – only now as an assistant general counsel at Hines, a privately held real estate investment firm operating in 28 countries with $90 billion of investments under management. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook honor Terrell with the 2022 Houston Senior Counsel of the Year Award.
Schlumberger CLO Dianne Ralston is 2022 Houston General Counsel of the Year
Dianne Ralston had no lawyers in her immediate family and her father, a petroleum engineer, had been deposed a few times and had no fondness for the legal profession. But Ralston found law fascinating. Today, she is the chief legal officer at Schlumberger NV, where she oversees a team of 400 lawyers and compliance professionals operating in 60 countries. During the past two years, Ralston onboarded four new corporate directors, revamped and updated the global corporation’s enterprise risk management processes and dramatically reorganized her legal and compliance teams. ACC Houston and The Lawbook named her the 2022 Houston GC of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
Photo: Sharon Ferranti
Q&A: Schlumberger CLO Dianne Ralston
For Premium Subscribers Ralston, who previously served as the general counsel of two other energy companies – Weatherford International and TechnipFMC – talks about the path she took to the top tier of her profession, as well as her expectations of outside counsel.
Q&A: Niko Lorentzatos
Premium-Only Content: Niko Lorentzatos identifies what he looks for in outside counsel and recalls career mentors. Plus, Lorentzatos performing with his college band Lost in the Supermarket.
Forget Goats, Oasis GC Niko Lorentzatos is ‘The Buffalo’
Nickolas Lorentzatos faced 1,003 days of trials and tribulations and survived. The Oasis Petroleum general counsel had a tumultuous 33 months. There were the deaths of his father and mother. There was the Covid-19 pandemic and the crash of oil prices, which resulted in Oasis filing for bankruptcy. Lorentzatos in 2021 led a series of M&A deals, which included two $6 billion mergers.
“This time period pushed everyone to their limits and beyond, but the Oasis team answered the call time and again,” Lorentzatos told The Texas Lawbook. “I have never seen anything like it before and probably never will again.” The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Lawbook named Lorentzatos the 2022 Houston General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
Houston Corp. Counsel Award Winners: Theresa Terrell, Niko Lorentzatos, Travis Torrence, Bo Shi and Diane Greene
Nearly 200 Houston general counsel and corporate lawyers packed the Four Seasons Hotel Thursday night for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards.
The big winners of the fourth annual awards, which highlight the successful legal work of corporate in-house counsel, involved general counsel and senior counsel at Shell USA, Crescent Energy, Hines, GSFSGroup and Oasis Petroleum.
Q&A: William Turcotte, Noble Corporation
William Turcotte counts losing his father as one of the most impactful experiences in his life. “I wasn’t prepared for something like that,” Turcotte told Mark Curriden in this special Q&A. He explains what it took to rebound and how it informs his life now as GC of Noble Corp.
William Turcotte’s Big Year: Bankruptcy, Two Major Mergers, a Pandemic, Marriage and a Cowboy’s Common Sense
Growing up the son of a South Texas rancher and educator, William Turcotte learned about facing tough times, long days of manual labor and the importance of a great education. Turcotte needed those principles the past two years as the general counsel at Noble Corporation. In a matter of months, he led the offshore drilling contractor in and out of bankruptcy, eliminating $3.4 billion in bond debt. Only weeks after emerging from Chapter 11, Noble acquired Pacific Drilling. In November 2021, Turcotte and Noble were at it again, closing a $3.13 billion all-stock merger with Maersk Drilling.
“The joke was ‘You can always sleep when you’re dead,’” Turcotte told The Texas Lawbook. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Turcotte as one of two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement: Archrock GC Stephanie Hildebrandt
For three decades, Stephanie Hildebrandt has been general counsel in some of the biggest and complicated civil lawsuits and M&A transactions in Texas. She’s been the GC at Archrock, a Houston-based provider of natural gas contract compression services, where she led the company’s $1 billion take-private transaction of Archrock Partners. Hildebrandt spent more than a decade as general counsel at Enterprise Products, where she supervised three huge acquisitions for the company, including the $4.4 billion merger with Oiltanking Partners, the 2011 purchase of Duncan Energy for $2.4 billion and the 2009 acquisition of Teppco Partners for $3.3 billion.
This Thursday evening, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Hildebrandt with the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Q&A: David Stryker
Premium-Only Content: David Stryker goes into the keys to overcoming the challenges in the Starboard proxy battle and what’s next.
David Stryker’s Successfully Litigious Year
For more than four years, Huntsman Corp. and its General Counsel David Stryker fought a high-stakes legal battle over an acquisition of a company whose technology ended up not working. Stryker and Huntsman hired the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to sue for fraud and breach of contract. In 2021, Huntsman and Kirkland won, securing an arbitration victory that led to a $665 million settlement. More recently, Huntsman and Stryker secured a $94 million jury verdict in New Orleans in a separate lawsuit. Stryker’s recent wins came in quick succession, but they were the product of the deep-seated instinct for advocacy that has coursed through Stryker’ veins since the day he became a trial lawyer. The 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year goes to Stryker and the lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis.
Phillips 66 Team Used 11 p.m. Nightly Calls and Creative Legal Work to Complete $3.4B Transaction
Each night at 11 p.m. for nearly a year, Robert Task, Julie Pradel and Maine Goodfellow were on the phone discussing the problems they faced, the challenges lying ahead and the successes achieved that day. The three senior-level in-house counsel at Phillips 66 spent hundreds and hundreds of hours negotiating the terms, handling due diligence, doing the paperwork and getting the necessary approvals to push Phillips 66’s $3.4 billion acquisition of its limited partner, Phillips 66 Partners, over the finish line. Task, Pradel and Goodfellow faced multiple headwinds: stresses from the lingering pandemic, fluctuating oil and gas prices, rising interest rates, a tumultuous global economic environment and wild swings in stock prices. But they got the deal done and it is a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Transaction of the Year.
Q&A: Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett
Premium-Only Content: Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett describes how her family history and Okinawan heritage give her strength.
Q&A: Rob Task, Julie Pradel and Maine Goodfellow
Premium-Only Content: The Phillips 66 trio share what they look for in hiring outside counsel and detail public service projects they are involved in.
Medical Informatics Associate GC Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett Helps ‘Save Lives Bit by Bit’
Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett was nine when her grandfather needed a heart transplant. She was there when doctors used an artificial heart machine to keep him alive while he waited his turn on the transplant list. “I couldn’t believe how this one piece of technology was not only keeping him alive, but vastly improved his quality of life,” she said. “All those experiences I lived through with him led me to end up where I am today, working for a healthcare-technology company that creates software to make the jobs of healthcare professionals more efficient and accurate, in order to save more lives.”
Twenty-five years later, Desgranges-Ellett is the associate general counsel and compliance officer at Medical Informatics Corp., a healthcare-technology company where she helped create and implement the company’s first contract-management system, led the company’s internal-ethics initiative and mentoring program and is designing the formal return-to-work policies and procedures. She is also a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.
Q&A: Kathleen Bertolatus
Premium-Only Content: Kathleen Bertolatus offers advice for outside counsel and shares why she believes pro bono work helps make lawyers better.
Phillips 66’s Kathleen Bertolatus: Pro Bono ‘Can Truly Change the Lives of Our Clients’
Seven weeks ago, a 15-year-old West African who had never been in an airplane before and who speaks very little English walked through the international arrival terminal at Bush International Airport with three bags containing everything he owned. The teen’s mother, her body stricken with cancer and worn from years of being beaten by male relatives in her homeland, raced to hug her son after nearly four years and 6,000 miles of separation.
The reunion was the result of four long years of legal work by Phillips 66 Senior Counsel Kathleen Bertolatus, who represented the mother in a series of immigration proceedings that resulted in the mother obtaining asylum and being reunited with her teenaged daughter after both faced forced female genital mutilation by their family and certain death if they didn’t comply. That was in 2019. On March 30 of this year, the great pro bono legal work of Bertolatus allowed mother, son and daughter to be together and to be safe.
Q&A: Cynthia Martinez
Premium-Only Content: Cynthia Martinez discusses the biggest challenges facing renewable energy today and identifies life and career mentors.
Total Energies’ Cynthia Redwine Martinez Has ‘Solar-Coaster Street Cred’ in Leading the Energy Transition
During the past two years, TotalEnergies assistant general counsel Cynthia Redwine Martinez has become one of the leading renewable energy law experts in the U.S. But it didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident. The path she took started a couple decades ago as the daughter of a glass-ceiling-smashing, highly respected Houston lawyer who became the first general counsel for Rice University. Fast-forward more than a decade later. Her reputation in the world of renewable and solar energy law is nearly unmatched. From the fourth quarter of 2019 to the end of 2021, Martinez has been a lead lawyer in nearly a dozen major clean energy acquisitions and joint ventures involving offshore wind operations and solar projects.
Q&A: Ashley Hill
Premium-Only Content: Ashley Hill reveals her pet peeves regrading outside counsel and makes a case for being hopeful about the future of diversity in the legal profession.
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