More than 225 leaders of the corporate legal profession in Houston celebrated the 2025 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards this past Thursday, which recognized general counsel and senior managing counsel from companies ranging from Phillips 66 and Shell to Enbridge, Baker Hughes and Transocean.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook hosted 20 corporate in-house counsel who had been nominated for awards in 14 categories, from Rookie of the Year and Lifetime Achievement to M&A Transaction and Business Litigation of the Year.
The Houston Corporate Counsel Awards honor corporate legal departments and their leaders for extraordinary leadership and success during the past 18 months.
“There was a tremendous energy at this year’s Houston Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony,” said Texas Lawbook publisher Brooks Igo, who was co-master of ceremonies along with Gabriella Aliberti, head of legal at LITASCO Pan Americas and an ACC Houston board member.
The event was “a testament to how loved and appreciated the group of honorees are by their colleagues, outside counsel and peers,” Igo said. “As many attendees noted, it was a truly impressive gathering of some of the most accomplished and respected attorneys in Houston. We are grateful for ACC Houston and our sponsors for the opportunity to host this celebration and further those bonds.”
Past award recipients served as judges of the 90 or so nominations that were made.
Seven of the 14 categories were competitive. Below is a list of the recipients of the 2025 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards.
The Rookie of the Year award went to Enbridge Senior Counsel Kathryn Hand. Since joining the legal department at the Canada-based midstream giant in 2023, Hand has scored significant litigation achievements during the past two years, including winning a case at the Ohio Supreme Court that involved hundreds of millions of dollars. A full profile of Hand can be read here.
Past recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include Robb Voyles, Victoria Lazar, Larry Dreyfuss and Carolyn Benton Aiman. For 2025, ACC Houston and The Lawbook selected two extraordinary recipients. They are former Vitol General Counsel Ernie Kohnke and Occidental Petroleum Chief Legal Officer Sylvia Kerrigan.
Kerrigan spent 22 years at Marathon Oil, where she served as executive vice president and general counsel. She was central to the company’s corporate positioning, including a spin-off of its refining, transportation and retail assets in 2011 and the subsequent recasting of corporate culture and capital allocation.
Now the chief legal officer at Oxy, Kerrigan has built an extraordinary career and sought to positively impact the world — whether within her own company, the companies of the boards she serves on, her universities, the energy industry writ large or in countries around the world. For example, Sylvia served a two-year appointment on a United Nations Security Council commission tasked with assessing losses and awarding damages to multinational companies affected by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Today, Kerrigan is helping shape the world’s energy future through scalable solutions to meet growing energy demand, low-carbon power and fuels and sustainable mineral development. The Lawbook will publish a feature-length profile on Kerrigan and her career during the next few weeks.
Kohnke retired earlier this year after eight years as general counsel at Vitol. An Eagle Scout, Kohnke demonstrates that stepping on others is not required for success, that reinvention is possible and that painful lessons can yield positive change.
As GC, he remedied the siloing in the legal team. He began meeting with his team twice a week to emphasize that they were there to help the business. He grew and enhanced the Vitol legal team by being one of those rare leaders who genuinely like helping people achieve their career goals.
And he was leading the work of his team right up to the day he retired. In 2024 alone, he handled four M&A deals, including the $2.15 billion sale of Vitol’s upstream oil-producing assets, the sale of 21 solar renewable projects and seven wind renewable projects for more than $400 million, and the separate sale of seven different wind renewable project for more than $250 million. The Lawbook will publish Kohnke’s profile and her over the next few weeks.
Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department was the closest vote in the 2025 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards. Weatherford International Deputy General Counsel Christi Morrison edged out Phillips 66 Managing Counsel Kathleen Bertolatus by a single vote.
Morrison and her team successfully led the oilfield services company through its first-ever capital return program. This project included successfully launching a dividend issuance, instituting dividend equivalent rights and designing and implementing a share repurchase program, which was even more complicated since Weatherford is incorporated in Ireland, has tax residency in Switzerland, is headquartered in Houston and has operations in 75 countries.
Last year, Morrison also successfully led the full and final redemption of the company’s secured notes.
The Lawbook plans to publish an in-depth profile of Morrison in the next two weeks.
Senior Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department went to Maverick Natural Resources Senior Litigation Counsel Sarah Payne.
Payne went to college and graduate school to be a journalist covering the music industry with the dream of writing for Rolling Stone. Her father, then a Houston trial lawyer, had other ideas.
“I was worn down by my tenacious father over the course of two decades,” Payne told The Lawbook. “My entering the profession was likely inescapable.”
Payne recently led Maverick to a huge courtroom victory after a four-year contract dispute with XTO Energy regarding revenue sharing as part of a joint venture. A full profile of Payne can be found here.
The 2025 Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion was awarded to Adam MacLuckie and Huyen Luong of Shell USA.
Luong and MacLuckie led the Shell US legal DEI council during a pivotal time, fostering open dialogue and community through their “Let’s Talk About It” campaign as the company returned to in-person work after the pandemic and amid a nationwide reckoning with racism. Drawing from their personal backgrounds — Luong’s journey from postwar Vietnam and MacLuckie’s lifelong path to allyship — they built inclusive, two-way engagement that increased participation and trust.
Texas Lawbook pro bono and diversity reporter Krista Torralva featured MacLuckie and Luong in this profile.
The recipient of the General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department Award was David Kuo.
As the chief legal officer of Applied Optoelectronics, Kuo and his team led the optical communications company through a series of high-value financing transactions for more than $268 million in 2024, including various ATM offerings, registered direct offerings, and note offerings. He also led the settlement of a major arbitration from the termination of an asset disposition transaction that was valued at $150 million, resulting in favorable outcomes for the company in 2024 and 2025.
David also guided the company to build a sizeable portfolio of intellectual property assets, including registered trademarks and 335 issued patents in the U.S., China, Taiwan, and Europe.
The profile detailing Kuo’s successes will publish in the next few weeks.
General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department went to Microvast Holdings General Counsel Isida Tushe. A one-woman army for Microvast, Tushe juggles multiple roles and responsibilities, including president, GC and corporate secretary.
In 2024, Tushe led Microvast’s successful efforts to restructure its debt outside of the bankruptcy process. This was a key achievement that allowed the company to significantly reduce its debt, including negotiating one secured contract down to $23 million from $70 million. Its overseas customers remained in place — providing a revenue stream — and the significant write-offs of debt led Microvast to impressive profitability in the third quarter of 2024 and a 27 percent increase in annual revenue.
An in-depth profile of Tushe will publish in the next few weeks.
Ivett Hughes was honored with the Harry Reasoner Pro Bono Advocacy Award, which recognizes extraordinary contributions to pro bono and public service.
In the first quarter of 2024, Baker Hughes launched a global legal and compliance diversity, inclusion and belonging counsel with the mission of infusing those values into the legal department through internal and external engagement. The energy power tapped Ivett to lead its efforts in Houston.
Ivett’s team of 22 lawyers, plus legal staff, partnered with Houston Volunteer Lawyers and set a goal of serving four clients — roughly one pro bono case per five lawyers in its Houston office. They blew past their goal by an “astonishing” 500 percent, said HVL Executive Director Jessica Howton Stool, who nominated Hughes for the award.
“Through their exceptional leadership, strategic pro bono initiatives and measurable impact, Baker Hughes has established itself as a corporate leader in pro bono service,” Howton Stool said.
Texas Lawbook pro bono and diversity reporter Krista Torralva featured Ivett in this profile.
General Counsel of the Year for a Midsize Legal Department was awarded to ChampionX General Counsel Julia Wright.
Wright was a third grader when she did a book report on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “I didn’t know women could be lawyers until I read that book,” Wright told The Lawbook. “I knew then that it was what I wanted to do.”
An oilfield and gas technology solutions company with a $4.7 billion market cap, ChampionX has witnessed extraordinary growth and changes during Wright’s seven years on the job. Since becoming ChampionX’s GC in 2018, Wright has helped the new company go public, led multiple transactions and overseen the expansion of the company’s board of directors.
And for the past year, Wright and her team have been leading their biggest and most important project yet: the $8.2 billion sale of ChampionX to SLB — the company formerly known as Schlumberger — which is expected to close within a few months.
The full article on Wright can be found here.
The General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department went to Brady Long of Transocean.
Long led the Transocean legal team through multiple high-stakes litigation matters in 2024 that collected $49 million in four recoveries, including settlements in two lawsuits in India, one in California and a non-litigated dispute in Brazil. Long and Transocean also continued to resolve claims arising from the Deepwater Horizon incident, including closing out another 225 lawsuits in 2024. Only 27 of the more than 100,000 cases filed in connection with the incident are still active.
At the end of 2024, Long and his team initiated a request for proposals from 62 law firms worldwide. The company has now negotiated new rates with 90 percent of those firms.
The Lawbook is working on an in-depth profile of Long.
The Creative Partnership Award in 2025 goes to an organization that embodies the very name of this award.
Chevron Phillips Chemical Assistant GC Cheryl-Lynne Davis and Baker Botts associate Teresa Jones shared Thanksgiving dinner in 2023. Over turkey and all the fixings, Davis and Jones discussed professional struggles they faced and together started working on a solution that now benefits some of the largest corporations in South Texas.
“What started as a casual conversation quickly became a shared mission: to create space for people like us to build community, exchange knowledge and uplift one another,” Jones said.
The seeds Davis and Jones sowed that day led to the creation of Black Women in Energy and Environmental Law. BWEL has witnessed tremendous success in the 16 months since it was founded. The full article on BWEL can be found here.
ACC Houston and The Lawbook awarded two different legal teams with the 2025 Houston M&A Transaction of the Year.
Waste Management Chief Legal Officer Charles Boettcher led his legal department and his outside counsel at Vinson Elkins in a highly complex $7.2 billion transaction.
Waste Management’s acquisition of Stericycle was particularly complex. In a courtship that saw its share of ups and downs over several years, the deal overcame and outdistanced a pricing class action, an ongoing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation and the integration of a related but entirely different business that expanded the boundaries of growth for Waste Management into a new and complex medical environment.
To read the full profile of Waste Management’s deal by The Lawbook’s Allen Pusey, click here.
The other recipient of the M&A Transactions of the Year was Marathon Oil’s sale to ConocoPhillips in 2024 in an all-stock transaction valued at $22.5 billion, including $5.4 billion of net debt. Marathon was led by its then-General Counsel Kim Warnica and her outside counsel at Kirkland & Ellis, Sean Wheeler and Debbie Yee.
One of the biggest challenges with Marathon’s sale to ConocoPhillips, according to Warnica, was not the deal itself but the weather. The hurricane-force winds of a derecho hit Houston right as Warnica’s discussions with ConocoPhillips were beginning. Many people, including Kim, had no power, Wi-Fi or cell service for over a week. Warnica remembers sitting in the middle of the street outside the front of her house late at night, trying to get a cell signal so she could participate in conference calls. The deal closed in November 2024, and Warnica is now chief legal officer at Apache Corporation. The Lawbook is working on an in-depth profile of Warnica and the complex deal.
The Houston Business Litigation of the Year went to Baker Hughes Vice President of Litigation Teresa Garcia-Reyes and outside counsel at Yetter Coleman.
Garcia-Reyes, who oversees about 80 attorneys, shifted from defendant to plaintiff in a yearslong legal battle with LiquidPower Specialty Products, overcoming patent infringement claims through inter partes review while building a strong antitrust case. This strategy, spanning U.S. and Canadian courts and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, enabled Baker Hughes to settle in December 2024 and clear the way for a new product launch.
“We are an energy technology company, so we take IP cases and the effect that they have on the ability to market our products very seriously,” Garcia-Reyes said.
Texas Lawbook senior litigation reporter Michelle Casady authored an in-depth profile on the Baker Hughes litigation.
Finally, in 2025, ACC Houston and The Lawbook launched a new category: Houston Corporate Legal Department of the Year.
In its inaugural year, the judges for this award determined that the legal departments at Phillips 66 and Talen Energy were both deserving of the honor.
In 2024, the Phillips 66 legal department demonstrated performance excellence and innovation in managing legal operations, leveraging artificial intelligence and implementing predictive analytics. The result: P66 saved $2.6 million and improved efficiency and processes through implementing a progressive outside counsel program and launched a multiyear legal business transformation initiative that has yielded $18 million more in legal cost savings.
The legal team also led several complex transactions, including the disposition of the Los Angeles Refinery in California, the $1.2 billion sale of P66’s Switzerland COOP retail business and the $2.2 billion acquisition of EPIC advancing the company’s wellhead-to-market integrated portfolio.
Talen Energy, led by General Counsel John Wander, made a rapid transformation from bankruptcy to a thriving multibillion-dollar enterprise, which is a direct result of the strategic vision and legal acumen of its corporate legal team. The Talen team spearheaded a series of complex and innovative transactions in 2024. A few highlights include:
- Selling its hyperscale data center campus in Pennsylvania to Amazon Web Services for $650 million;
- The $785 million sale of a 1,710 MW generation portfolio located in the South Zone of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to CPS Energy;
- Successfully uplisting on the NASDAQ Global Select Market; and
- Closing the year by facilitating a series of financing transactions totaling $3.3 billion.
The impact of these strategic initiatives is evident in Talen’s stock performance, which surged from $64 per share on Jan. 2, 2024, to $201 by year’s end. And now Talen is a Corporate Legal Department of the Year honoree.
The Lawbook will publish in-depth articles on the legal departments of Talen Energy and Phillips 66 during the next few weeks.
More photos from the 2025 ACC Houston Awards celebration
