More than 400 corporate general counsel, senior in-house counsel and prominent business lawyers across North Texas celebrated the 2024 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards Thursday night at the George W. Bush Institute.
“What a magnificent event and a great night for the legal profession,” said Toyota Motor North America Chief Legal Officer Sandra Phillips, who was the recipient of the 2024 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook presented awards to 15 in-house counsel who achieved extraordinary successes during the past 18 months.
The ceremony opened with a moment of silence for the passengers, crew and soldiers who died in Washington, D.C., this week, when an American Airlines regional jet on approach for landing was struck by a military helicopter.
“It really hit hard and this is a tough time for us but we are focusing on our customers and our team members to make sure that we all get through this,” American Airlines senior counsel Steffen Horlacher, the recipient of the 2024 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year Award for a Large Legal Department, told the audience.
There were also multiple standing ovations, lots of laughs and even some tears as a few recipients told their extraordinary stories of human survival.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook awarded trophies in 13 different categories — six of them had multiple finalists. In all, there were more than 65 nominations for the 13 categories. ACC-DFW and The Lawbook had more than a dozen past recipients of the DFW Corporate Counsel Awards judge the various categories. The mission for those judges, who were screened for conflicts of interest, was to select the one or two in each category who were the best of the best — nominees who truly deserved the award. And then to choose the best of those final two on a scale of one to 10.
Some of the categories were so close that the separation was a single point.
One of those categories was DFW Corporate Legal Department of the Year. The judges selected Keurig Dr Pepper over Taxwell.
During 2024, KDP Chief Legal Officer Anthony 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, 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.
KDP also successfully resolved a yearslong SEC investigation, achieved the dismissal of multiple putative class action lawsuits and won a hotly contested forum dispute in significant commercial litigation. All this came only two years after the KDP legal department secured a $350 million payment from a breach of contract court victory against BodyArmor and Coca-Cola.
The 2024 DFW Business Litigation of the Year award was another category where the vote was incredibly close. The judges chose Texas Pacific Land over Helmerich & Payne by an inch.
When Micheal Dobbs took his first in-house job and joined Texas Pacific Land Corporation in August 2020, the pandemic was raging and the company was in the midst of arguably the biggest change in its more than 132-year history: transitioning from operating as a liquidating business trust to a Delaware corporation.
In 2022, two members of TPL’s board of directors failed to vote in accordance with the board’s recommendation at the annual meeting — in violation of an agreement — TPL would allege in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Dobbs, who brought in Sidley on the activist litigation, said, unlike most litigation where the parties fight it out and go their separate ways, this “litigation needed to be handled in a way that gave TPL a path forward without disrupting the performance of the board or management team.” After an expedited trial and appeal, the Delaware Supreme Court fully affirmed the ruling in favor of TPL last February.
The DFW M&A Deal of the Year also could have gone either way. The judges chose Arcosa and its GC, Bryan Stevenson.
Stevenson’s career has been marked by bold moves and transformative moments, culminating in his role as chief legal officer at Arcosa, where his strategic vision helped orchestrate the largest deal in the Dallas infrastructure products and solutions company’s history: the acquisition of a construction materials business based in New Jersey, Stavola Holding, and its other affiliated entities for $1.2 billion.
The target, Stavola, presented a unique challenge. It was a 75-year-old business that primarily served a region where Arcosa had no actual operating experience. Determining whether Arcosa could operate a large-scale business in unfamiliar territory with unique requirements was the main challenge Stevenson, his team and outside counsel at Kirkland & Ellis faced.
Equally close was the 2024 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Midsize Legal Department.
The judges selected Texas Capital GC Anna Alvarado. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Anna Alvarado grew up in government-subsidized housing at a work camp in Central California, picking grapes and selling cassette tapes. Neither of her parents spoke English. Her dad was an addict and felon who served prison time.
“Had it not been for all of those things and having to deal with all of those things, I would not be sitting here today,” Alvarado said in an interview. “I am the American dream.”
Today, she is the chief legal officer of Texas Capital and a member of the Dallas-based financial institution’s operating committee, which has created and grown an investment banking division and a broker-dealer group.
Alvarado’s colleague, Texas Capital Associate GC Ashley Ahn was the winner of the 2024 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year for a Midsize Legal Department.
For six weeks in 1981, three-year-old Ashley Nguyen Ahn was stranded in a small boat in the middle of the ocean with her family in an effort to flee certain execution by the Viet Cong. They ran out of food and then water. She witnessed friends and family dying. Ahn experienced more trauma, death and desperation as a toddler than most of us face in a lifetime. And she remembers it all.
“All of these early events made me who I am today,” she told The Lawbook. As associate GC, Ahn and her team at Texas Capital spent the last three years rebuilding and transforming Texas Capital into a premier financial services firm in the state.
The sixth competitive category was for 2024 DFW Rookie of the Year. The judges chose Cale Curtin of Matador Resources. Cale’s plan was to be a landman, but Chesapeake wasn’t hiring. So, he went to law school. Now, instead of negotiating with individual property owners to acquire mineral rights, Curtin is negotiating billion-dollar credit deals to acquire competitors.
As mentioned earlier, the 2024 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department was awarded to Steffen Horlacher.
Horlacher has been instrumental at American Airlines during his 26-year career, helping the airline navigate significant challenges like 9/11, the 2011 bankruptcy, the merger with US Airways and the pandemic. Recently, Horlacher led negotiations with motorcoach carrier Landline, making American the first airline to offer service in all 50 states. He also advised on a new alliance with Alaska Airlines that created international routes from Seattle and Los Angeles.
The 2024 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion went to Dallas Cowboys deputy general counsel Kaleisha Stuart.
When Stuart joined the Cowboys in February 2016, she was the only Black woman lawyer working in-house for any of the NFL teams. Since then, Stuart has demonstrated her commitment to fostering a more inclusive and supportive workplace through the creation and launch of The Fellowship, a Black employee resource group that hosts an annual Black History Month luncheon, and the creation of the Cowboys’ annual Juneteenth festival, which supports local black-owned businesses, features musicians and other artists and is sponsored by Miller Lite.
Stuart’s boss, Cowboys GC Jason Cohen says, “She creates an environment that we can all listen and learn from each other — fostering an open dialogue and a thoughtful approach.”
“People should know that Kaleisha cares — she cares about herself, others, the world around us and the Dallas Cowboys,” he said.
Toyota Motor North America Chief Legal Officer Sandra Phillips was honored with the 2024 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
Phillips is a true visionary whose contributions have helped Toyota Motor North America transform into a mobility company, a business that goes beyond just selling cars to people and offers a variety of options to manage travel needs. She has provided critical advice and counsel on transactions involving charging stations and infrastructure, partnerships with battery manufacturers, deployment of hydrogen fuel cells in heavy duty trucks, land acquisitions and construction and supply chain issues.
Sandra established and managed a Crisis Management Team to respond to high-stakes incidents following an October 2022 attack on Toyota’s Plano headquarters, during which an apparently disturbed individual shot bullets at and dropped nails around the campus facilities. She manages Toyota’s interactions with organized labor. She is a leader in the company’s government affairs efforts in Washington, D.C., and with the states.
Sandra has also built one of the most talented and diverse legal teams in the country and is widely recognized as a great developer of talent.
The DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department was awarded to Russ Denton at Irving-based Caris Life Sciences.
Denton is described as the kind of general counsel that executives are happy to have and outside counsel with whom they hope to work. In two years at Caris Life Sciences, Denton has helped the molecular science and technology company bring new products to market with FDA approval – including a minimally invasive liquid biopsy option for biomarker analysis and serial monitoring of cancer patients – while also leading an appeal in litigation with United Healthcare that convinced the Fifth Circuit that a District Court had incorrectly applied the law.
Russ, who had previously guided Caris through two rounds of financing as its main outside counsel before taking the GC job, also quickly helped the company obtain a senior secured term loan to boost external capital to $1.7 billion.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook selected North Texas Tollway Authority GC Dena as the recipient of the 2024 DFW General Counsel of the Year Award for a Governmental Agency/Nonprofit.
Dena Stroh has achieved unparalleled success during her decade as the general counsel at the North Texas Tollway Authority. She and her team worked with the NTTA Finance team to refinance billions of first and second-tier, taxable and tax-exempt revenue bonds to save toll payers hundreds of millions of dollars. She implemented a third-party ethics line where employees and others can anonymously report their concerns. She also launched additional ethics-related training.
But in November, Dena scored a monumental courtroom victory. She learned in 2020 from engineers that 69 walls along its highway system were defective and unsafe. NTTA started systematically fixing the walls, but filed a lawsuit against the original contractors to determine who should pay to fix the walls. Dena sat through the 10-day jury trial and was in the courtroom when the jury returned with a verdict after only a couple of hours.
In an interview with The Lawbook, Dena said, “There is a natural moment when one wonders whether we should have settled the case but I knew that our lawyers put on the best possible case using their best efforts, and I felt that the jury understood NTTA’s position as this was one of the most attentive juries that I’ve seen.”
Dena’s faith in her lawyers and the jury system was proven right. The jury found the contractor breached the contract and awarded NTTA $280 million.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook honored three extraordinary corporate in-house counsel with the 2024 DFW Lifetime Achievement Award.
The first is Torrid Chief Legal Officer Bridgett Zeterberg. Over the course of her remarkable career, Zeterberg has served as general counsel for influential private and public companies. In these roles, she guided businesses through periods of transformation, including “acquisition of the company” and transition responsibilities. This also included significant business transactions, navigating the pandemic, “successful emergence” from Chapter 11 with full payment to claimants, and other seismic changes to business and legal structures at those companies.
Bridgett’s first GC role was at Zale, a publicly traded company, where she served four years and guided the business through a $1.4 billion sale.
Next, Bridgett joined Total Wine & More to serve as the private company’s first-ever GC and build a high-performing and integrated legal department.
Bridgett then joined Tuesday Morning, where she would face one of the most challenging tasks of her career. When the pandemic hit, the retailer was forced to shut down most of its stores and furlough a majority of its employees. Under Bridgett’s leadership, the company successfully navigated Chapter 11 proceedings. Tuesday Morning emerged as a reorganized entity — able to move forward and eventually rehire most of its employees.
Bridgett is now the chief legal officer at Torrid, a specialty women’s apparel company.
The Lawbook and ACC-DFW also presented DFW Lifetime Achievement awards to Tenet Healthcare’s Marita Covarrubias and Toyota Motor North America’s Derek Lipscombe.
Marita Covarrubias was a secret agent for the Syndicate in the X-Files, leaking highly classified documents to FBI Fox “Spooky” Mulder. The real-life Marita Covarrubias has been a leading in-house counsel at Tenet for 25 years. The real-life Marita has managed some of the largest employment and general business litigation matters throughout the country. She started as counsel for Tenet in 1999 as its first employment attorney, and rose through the ranks, becoming a trusted advisor not just for the facility HR teams for Tenet and its subsidiaries, the various management members she provides counsel to, but also its Executive Team and its Board. Marita is the “go to” person for Tenet’s top business litigation disputes.
And while Marita declines to say how her name became part of the X-Files because the people here tonight do not have the proper security clearance, her husband Derek told The Lawbook that “The Truth is out there.”
Speaking of Derek Lipscombe, Derek was an award-winning reporter for the Flint Journal in Michigan writing about the lack of preparedness by local firefighters in handling chemical spills and fires from hazardous materials. But Derek’s mother kept pressuring Derek to become a lawyer. After graduating from law school, Derek interviewed for a job at Loeb & Loeb in Los Angeles. The hiring partner for the firm was none other than Marita. Derek did not take the job offer but he asked Marita out on a date and 18 days later asked her to marry him.
After working for several years as a lawyer at JC Penney, Derek joined the Toyota legal department in 2015 as managing counsel handling labor and employment matters. He has handled cases all across the country. During Derek’s first year, he was able to reduce the company’s legal spend on those traditional labor issues by more than $1 million by doing the work himself. Those efforts have continued. Last year, he successfully defended an arbitration action involving a former executive in California who sued for discrimination and wrongful termination. After a two-week trial, the arbitration panel ruled in Toyota’s favor.
Click here to read the in-depth profiles of this year’s finalists and winners.