Anthony Shoemaker tracks his success as a lawyer and a leader back to his high school days when he worked at a local golf club repair shop in the Houston suburbs.
“The couple that owned the business spent every day in the shop devoting themselves to their customers and helped show me how you earn trust by showing up every day ready to serve,” Shoemaker told The Texas Lawbook. “I’ve had jobs in sports television production, law firms, healthcare and now the beverage industry, but the common thread has been able to learn from amazing people who showed me what it means to be a professional, take pride in your work, own your mistakes and set an example for others.”
Shoemaker has taken those lessons learned and implemented them throughout his three years as the chief legal officer at Keurig Dr Pepper. The results have been extraordinary successes for himself, for the corporate legal department he leads and for the $15 billion Frisco-based company.
During 2024, Shoemaker and his team led several major transactions for Keurig Dr Pepper, including the $990 million acquisition of a majority stake in Chicago-based Ghost Lifestyle (makers of Ghost Energy and other beverage and nutrition products), the purchase of the assets of Arizona’s Kalil Bottling Company and finalizing new partnership deals with coffee brands such as La Colombe, Black Rifle, Lavazza and Killah Coffee.
All this comes only two years after the Keurig Dr Pepper legal department secured a $350 million payment from a breach of contract court victory against BodyArmor and Coca-Cola.
“I’m most proud of how we have transformed the legal team’s stature and influence within the enterprise,” Shoemaker said. “We have been very deliberate in adding new talent and proving our value to business partners such that our lawyers are typically invited to sit on [business units] and functional leadership teams and get involved in the early stages of all major strategic decisions and transactions.”
Since 2022, Shoemaker has added more than 15 new positions to his legal department, which now has a staff of more than 50 attorneys and paralegals while at the same time lowering the company’s total legal spend by 40 percent.
“One of the team’s biggest success stories has been standing up a legal operations function to help make the department more efficient and help drive down costs,” Shoemaker said. “One of the things we realized was that we had a lot of opportunity to in-source more work and drive down overall costs while growing the department.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook have named Keurig Dr Pepper as one of two finalists for the 2024 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Corporate Legal Department of the Year.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook will celebrate the finalists and announce the winners at the annual DFW Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony on Jan. 30 at the George W. Bush Institute.
“KDP legal has undergone significant transformation in the past several years to become one of the preeminent legal departments in the DFW area,” said Newhouse + Noblin owner Russell Newhouse, who nominated Keurig Dr Pepper for the award. “The team plays an integral role in Keurig Dr Pepper’s pursuit of its vision to provide a beverage for every need, anytime, anywhere and exemplifies the company’s culture of top beverage talent with a challenger mindset.”
“In 2024, KDP Legal helped negotiate and ink two of the most significant acquisitions in the company’s history, finalized significant partnership deals with major coffee brands and played a key role in facilitating major capital markets transactions, including the largest overnight equity block trade in history,” Newhouse said. “It also successfully resolved a yearslong SEC investigation, achieved the dismissal of multiple putative class action lawsuits, won a hotly contested forum dispute in a significant commercial litigation and negotiated an expanded distribution deal with a major national retailer.”
Kirkland & Ellis partner Jeremy Fielding said KDP’s success starts with Shoemaker, whom he describes as a “savvy and smart” leader who is “trusted and beloved by the people who work for him.”
“Anthony is a visionary leader,” Fielding said. “When he became the GC, he had a distinct vision of the culture and climate he wanted to create. And he has done an extraordinary job of executing on that vision and inspiring everyone on the legal team to embrace it.”
Krista Hanvey, who is the co-managing partner of the Dallas office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said Shoemaker possesses a “unique mix of business acumen and authentic, people-centered leadership.”
“He never loses sight of the big picture and demonstrates fantastic judgment that both spurs growth and protects KDP’s brands,” Hanvey said. “When he became KDP’s general counsel, he made it his express goal to build the best in-house legal department in Dallas, and with the incredible influx of talent he has drawn to KDP, he is well on his way to accomplishing that goal. At the same time, he’s genuinely invested in the well-being and development of each member of his team.”
“Whether he’s steering a complex compliance initiative or guiding someone’s career, Anthony leads with a blend of vision and empathy that creates an environment that allows his team to thrive,” Hanvey said. “Anthony has built a cross-functional team of some of the best and brightest in their respective areas. He has talented lawyers in all of the key areas for the business — licensing, securities, employment, litigation, M&A, etc. In each area, there is a depth of talent that works together to solve complex issues.”
Shoemaker said that his biggest challenge came in 2022 when he counseled KDP’s board of directors in its internal compliance investigation into the company’s then-CEO Ozan Dokmecioglu, who resigned due to violations of the company’s code of conduct.
“I worked closely with KDP’s board of directors to bring the matter to conclusion in a way that I believe exemplifies KDP’s commitment to ethics and integrity,” he said. “We’ve had a fair amount of leadership transition during the past several years, which comes with new challenges as teams evolve and reset. I’ve worked for three CEOs during my time as KDP’s CLO, so there is an element of learning and adjusting that goes along with any new boss.”
But Shoemaker goes out of his way to highlight the other members of his legal team. One of those is Stephen Cole, KDP’s senior counsel and head of litigation.
“Stephen Cole is also a star with an incredibly bright future,” Fielding said. “In many ways, he’s a poster child of the culture. He is practical and solution oriented. He’s not afraid of aggression but makes decisions with his head instead of his spleen. He digests complex issues easily. And he has excellent judgment — in the face of a complex record, he has the extraordinary ability to identify the issues that will move the needle with a judge, a jury, or a counterparty.”
“Our department is seen as a true business partner,” Cole said. “Our clients come to us, of course, for our legal advice but also our strategic counseling and business guidance. I’ve seen many places where the legal department is seen as either a box to check before a business initiative is launched or the dreaded ‘department of no.’ At KDP, we don’t have to remind our clients to ‘involve legal early’ because it’s built into the culture at KDP.”
Cole and others say that there are many other members of the KDP legal team that are true stars.
One of those is Assistant General Counsel Lisa Dalfonso, who has been with the company for more than 25 years.
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Anthony Shoemaker discusses the traits he seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with him and more.
“Lisa knows more about this business than any of us lawyers, and many of our internal clients, will ever collectively understand,” Cole said. “And while she’s an incredible lawyer, she’s an even more impressive business partner. She has an innate ability to look at everything from the client’s perspective, understand their aims — sometimes better than they do — and navigate clients toward the solution that achieves the company’s goal.”
“And despite having more scope of responsibility than anyone besides Anthony, she dedicates an incredible amount of her time toward her individual team members, working with each and every one of them to help them develop personally and professionally,” he said. “Lisa is one of those people who seems to have 36 hours in each day, considering how much she accomplishes.”
One of the newest members of the KDP legal team is Lauren Mutti, who joined in June after eight years as head of labor and employment law at Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. The Lawbook asked Mutti what differentiates the KDP legal department from others.
“The collegiality we have amongst each other, while at the same time driving for excellence and pushing each other to always be better,” Mutti said. “We also truly embody the KDP challenger mindset, and we welcome new ideas on how to continue to evolve how we provide legal services.”
At the end of the day, according to Mutti, Cole and others, Shoemaker is the difference maker because he is “great at leading things he has never done himself, and he trusts the teams he hires to do the work.”
“Anthony believes in and cares deeply for every one of his team members,” Cole said. “He is renowned for welcoming, and in fact expecting, new and creative ideas from every corner of the department. It doesn’t matter if you’re a brand-new admin or paralegal or a seasoned attorney — if you’ve got an idea for how the department can function better, he’s all ears. Finally, but maybe most importantly, he has led the way in developing a reputation for the legal department as collaborators with our business clients, working hand-in-hand with them to think strategically and achieve the company’s objectives.”
FUN FACTS: Anthony Shoemaker
- Favorite book: I always come back to Freakonomics as my favorite book. We take so much of its concepts for granted now, but [about] 20 years ago, behavioral economics was a new field, and I read it right as I got out of the University of Chicago where they project was born, opening up my mind to completely different ways of seeing the world.
- Favorite music group: This is an easy one: The Grateful Dead. I am a longtime Deadhead and go see live music all the time (including whatever current iteration of Dead music is on tour).
- Favorite movie: The Godfather
- Favorite restaurant: Uchi. My wife and I love going there for a special occasion and just asking them to bring out whatever is best that night.
- Favorite beverage: Anything that can be mixed with Canada Dry tonic water or Polar seltzer — gin is a favorite.
- Favorite vacation: Two weeks in Singapore/Thailand in 2015
- Hero in life: My family is full of people I admire and try to model myself after, but no one more than my grandfather, Dr. Anthony Grana, who actually passed away in November 2021 while we were in the throes of the BodyArmor case. He taught me how to treat all people with respect and how to behave as a professional and bring your best to work each day.
FUN FACTS: Stephen Cole
- Favorite book: Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. It taught me a lot about how much history is shaped by who gets to write that history.
- Favorite music group: The Drive-By Trucker (especially when Jason Isbell was a member).
- Favorite movie: That’s tough. Probably Goodfellas — I can never turn that one off.
- Favorite restaurant: With the family, it’s hibachi and fried rice. But if I can get a babysitter, any nice steakhouse (and we have plenty to choose from in DFW)
- Favorite beverage: Anything from KDP, of course. Also, bourbon.
- Favorite vacation: Maui
- Hero in life: I’m going to have to go with the man on the poster I’m looking at while answering these questions — Jorge Soler — for his Game 6 home run that gave my Braves the 2021 World Series title (sorry, Astros fans).