Very few lawyers can say a natural disaster led them to go in-house.
For Thomas Gottsegen, it was a Category 5 known as Hurricane Katrina.
Gottsegen was a partner at Adams & Reese in New Orleans, practicing disputes and appellate law in August 2005. He was a regular in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the Louisiana Supreme Court and most of Louisiana’s intermediate appellate courts.
Gottsegen, his wife and three small children — including their eight-week-old daughter — lived blocks away from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and not far from one of the levees that breached in the storm surge.
A mere 36 hours before Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, made landfall, Gottsegen and his family “evacuated up-river to Baton Rouge” to stay with his wife’s sisters.
A little more than a week later, Gottsegen returned home to New Orleans. The scene was “surreal,” he said.
“We had to navigate fallen trees just to get to the front door, which, we soon found out, wouldn’t open,” he said. “The wooden floor boards downstairs had warped so severely that they prevented the door from opening inward. Try to imagine a floor being turned into a mini-mountain range, with actual topography.”
“Once we managed to get inside, we were confronted with the reality that nothing — not a single thing — had survived the two feet of fetid water that had festered for so long,” he continued. “Black mold covered every wall and ceiling. The stench — a distinct one that’s difficult to even describe — was overwhelming.”
“So much of the infrastructure that supported our young family vanished overnight,” he said.
Gottsegen continued to practice in Adams & Reese’s Baton Rouge office for more than a year and before moving to Houston.
“Moving to a much larger city meant access to lots of intriguing corporate opportunities,” he said. “Chevron gave me my shot, and proved to be a great training ground for in-house work.”
In the 17 years since, Gottsegen has worked his way up the legal ranks with Chevron, Statoil and now PURIS, a pipeline rehabilitation solutions and technology company in The Woodlands.
During his five years as general counsel at PURIS, Gottsegen has helped lead an acquisition of an equal-sized competitor that transformed the company in 2022 and 2023 and undertook a complicated streamlining of the organization that included eliminating corporate entities that were no longer necessary due to the merger.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Gottsegen as one of two finalists for the 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department.
ACC Houston and The Lawbook will honor Gottsegen and other award finalists and announce the winners at the awards ceremony Wednesday.
“Thomas has a unique background that has allowed him to possess a well-rounded set of legal skills in a variety of fields of law,” said Alain Dermarkar, a partner at A&O Shearman, who nominated Gottsegen for the award. “Thomas was trained as a commercial litigator at a top law firm, he then transitioned in house where he has served a variety of different roles including as a public company general counsel. His experience has provided him a comprehensive understanding of the law, which has enabled him to effectively navigate complex legal matters, whether it is drafting contracts, providing legal advice to a company board, counseling the company in litigation disputes, negotiating mergers and acquisitions.”
“Thomas is so respected that he is often sought by private equity sponsor J.F. Lehman & Company to serve as GC for multiple of their portfolio companies with the most thorny of legal issues,” Dermarkar said. “While Thomas is an excellent lawyer, he’s not the best lawyer in his house — his brilliant wife, Becky, is also great GC.”
Indeed. Eleox General Counsel Rebecca Gottsegen was a finalist last year for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year.
“Thomas has an incredible ability to quickly grasp the larger strategic picture, while still paying attention to the smallest details,” said John Funderburk of Kean Miller. “He does this by listening to every voice on every issue.”
“I have been in numerous meetings where Thomas says only what is required to maintain the flow of information, and then presents the business with a proposed strategy that incorporates what he just learned,” Funderburk said. “And, the strategy he presents is not focused just on the legal issues at hand, but on the way that those legal issues guide the business decisions that his internal clients must make.”
Premium Subscriber Q&A: PURIS GC Thomas Gottsegen discusses what he seeks in outside counsel and more.
Gottsegen was born and raised in New Orleans. His father was an orthodontist. His mother was a social worker.
His grandfather was what he calls a “country lawyer” in Alexandria, Louisiana, but it did not influence his career “one way or the other.”
Gottsegen earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and then a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.
“I’ve always loved to write, and thought I was headed for a career in journalism,” he said. But then, during his last year at USC, he took a First Amendment course taught by a practicing lawyer.
“Once I started reading Times v. Sullivan and other case law, I was hooked,” he said. “Funny enough, I’ve never practiced First Amendment law. But that course I took as part of my master’s program, serendipitously, caused me to pivot from journalism to law.”
Gottsegen earned his law degree from Northwestern University in 1997 and then clerked for legendary appellate judge Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In 1998, Kirkland & Ellis hired him for its litigation practice in Chicago. Nineteen months later, Adams & Reese lured Gottsegen to New Orleans, where he practiced until joining Chevron in January 2007.
After five years as senior counsel at Chevron, Gottsegen served as chief counsel at Statoil and its successor company, Equinor, for seven years. In April 2019, private equity sponsor John F. Lehman & Co. hired Gottsegen to be the general counsel of one of its portfolio companies, environmental services firm NRC Group Holdings Corporation, a U.S. publicly traded company.
His mission was simple: manage the sale of NRC to U.S. Ecology. Media reports put the sale price at $966 million.
“Probably Thomas’ greatest success was during his role as general counsel of NRC Group Holdings Corp., where he was an integral part of the team that first took the company public through a deSPAC transaction and then subsequently sold the company to another public company a couple years later — each resulting in tremendous results for the business and its stakeholders,” Dermarkar said.
In January 2020, John F. Lehman hired Gottsegen for a second job — as GC of PURIS, where he wears a lot of hats.
“Here, more than any other place I’ve worked, all members of the executive team routinely find themselves operating outside of our official lanes,” he said. “Frankly, we’re expected to do that irrespective of our title. We work collaboratively to solve problems of every type you can imagine.”
“For me to be an effective contributor, I’ve had to find ways to get comfortable outside of my traditional comfort zones,” he said. “But it’s been as fun as it’s been challenging. And I now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to run a successful business.”
In 2022, Inland Pipe Rehabilitation — an affiliated company also owned by Lehman — purchased competitor Inliner from Granite Construction in what Gottsegen calls “a complicated stock transaction followed by a complex integration process.”
“It was a transformational event for PURIS,” he said. “We emerged from the business combination as a company with scale, top-shelf operations, and terrific people. We also achieved synergies that exceeded our expectations.”
Mike Phillips of Kean Miller said Gottsegen has “an excellent understanding of not just his company’s legal issues, but his company’s business issues.”
“Thomas works very closely with the business team to ensure that what he is doing on the legal side matches his company’s business strategy,” Phillips said. “Thomas maintains the very difficult balance between being the chief legal officer at a diverse and sophisticated company and having to do so with no real legal staff or a team of outside lawyers that he can call upon at any time.”
“Thomas operates within a system that requires him to provide as sophisticated advice as many larger companies, but to do so with significantly less assets and a much tighter budget,” he said. “Thomas constantly has a multitude of ‘balls in the air’ but is always able to manage them effectively and efficiently.”
Gottsegen said he successfully tackled two significant initiatives in 2023. The most important was to make the workplace “the safest it can be” for his colleagues.
“Our philosophy is that one incident is too many, so the focus on improvement never stops,” he said. “In 2023, we saw our safety profile continue to improve dramatically — even though we’re bigger and executing more work in the field than ever.”
“On the legal side, our biggest initiative was streamlining the organization by eliminating corporate entities that were rendered obsolete by M&A activity and ensuring that our contracts and operations reside with the proper subsidiaries,” he said. “It might sound mundane, but it was a challenging and worthwhile project.”
John Klinghoffer of Goldberg Kohn in Chicago said Gottsegen goes out of his way to show respect and appreciation toward his colleagues. “Tom is completely without ego,” Kinghoffer said. “Tom is singularly focused on providing and/or securing the best legal advice available to his organization. To that end, Tom knows exactly what he knows and knows what he doesn’t know. He has an uncanny sense of when to rely on his own knowledge base and when to rely on subject matter expertise to get to the right answer.”