As a young litigator at Cox Smith in 2001, Lee Cusenbary was having lunch at LaFonda on Main Street in San Antonio when he saw Gobie Walsdorf, a college friend, who had recently become the president of San Antonio-based Mission Pharmacal.
They updated each other on their lives and their careers and agreed to stay in touch.
“One thing led to another, and he hired me to do legal work for the company,” Cusenbary told The Texas Lawbook in an interview.
Twenty-five years later, Cusenbary is a legend in the Texas business and legal communities, and that chance meeting led San Antonio-based Mission to hire Cusenbary as its general counsel in 2003. During his 17 years as the top lawyer at the pharmaceutical company, Cusenbary successfully engineered several large, complex multidistrict litigation cases and a handful of highly-technical patent infringement disputes, guided the drug company through acquisitions and divestitures, and oversaw hundreds, if not thousands, of complex commercial contracts and partnerships.
But Cusenbary’s name and reputation will forever be connected to elevating business and legal ethics. So much so that two of the highest honors that lawyers can receive — the Association of Corporate Counsel San Antonio Chapter’s Lee Cusenbary Ethical Life and Leadership Award and the San Antonio Legal Association’s Lee Cusenbary Impact Award — bear his name.
“Lee Cusenbary’s career shows how much one person can do to make a difference in a community,” said Dykema member Jeffrey Gifford. “Lee has left a lasting mark on the in-house counsel community, the San Antonio legal profession and the broader public. Lee made his career about being more than an excellent corporate counsel. He also made it about building a culture of ethics and of giving back.”
ACC San Antonio and The Texas Lawbook are awarding Cusenbary the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Cusenbary and 10 other corporate general counsel and lawyers will be honored at the inaugural San Antonio Corporate Counsel Awards on Nov. 6.
“Lee transformed the way the legal and business communities learn about ethics,” said Gifford, who nominated Cusenbary for the award.
In 2006, Cusenbary created the now highly-respected Ethics Follies, a Broadway-style musical that blends humor, music and real-world legal scenarios to make ethics education engaging and unforgettable. Over two decades, Cusenbary wrote, produced and directed shows for audiences in San Antonio and across the country, including performances for ACC, the State Bar of Texas, the American Bar Association, the Texas Minority Counsel Program and Walmart’s SuperConference.
“Lee’s lasting legacy or impact on San Antonio’s legal and business community is his lifelong passion for business ethics combined with his love of theater productions,” said Mary Belan Doggett, who is underwriting counsel at WFG National Title Insurance Company and a long-time San Antonio general counsel. “Next only to his wife, Dr. Teri Hospers, there is nothing more that he loves more than working on a speech or a show that imparts ethics lessons through storytelling.”
Steptoe & Johnson member Marty Truss said Cusenbary has “directly improved the lives of thousands” and “inspired many others to emulate his efforts and thereby magnify the scope of his impact for good.”
“Lee’s razor-sharp mind and superior communication skills always ensured that he was thoroughly equipped to analyze any legal issue no matter how nuanced or thorny and, more importantly, to effectively communicate his position on that issue to a client, opposing counsel or a judge and jury,” Truss said. “And although Lee was a fierce advocate for his clients and for Mission Pharmacal, Lee treated every adversary with respect and dignity, never allowing the sharp behavior of others to alter his personal code of conduct. These attributes combined with his obviously high ethical standards imbued Lee with an obvious aura of authenticity and made him an absolute master of the art of persuasion.”
“More than his extraordinary legal skills or his distinguished career as a practicing lawyer and in-house counsel, I think Lee’s true lasting legacy will be his philanthropic heart,” he said. “If every new lawyer could aspire to cultivating some of Lee Cusenbary’s professional and ethical standards, his steadfast decency toward everyone, including his adversaries, and his incredible philanthropic heart, our profession would be dramatically improved, as would the career satisfaction of every young lawyer following in Lee’s footsteps.”
“For such a burly, giant oak of a man, Lee has an incredibly tender and sentimental heart. And despite that incredibly tender and sentimental heart, Lee nonetheless has a wickedly irreverent and feisty sense of humor,” Truss said.
Cusenbary was born in Dover, Delaware. His father was a colonel in the Air Force where he served as a pilot in the Vietnam War. As a result, the family moved around a good bit until his father retired from the Air Force when Cusenbary was in the second grade and settled in San Antonio. His mother was a housewife who also was a docent at the McNay Art Museum and involved in many local charitable groups, including Gardenia Club and Assistance League.
With no lawyers in the family, Cusenbary first started considering law school when he was given an aptitude test in high school that suggested that he would be a good lawyer.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in business and corporate communications from the University of Texas in 1986, he went to St. Mary’s University School of Law, where he graduated in 1992.
For a decade, he practiced litigation in San Antonio at law firms including Cox Smith — now Dykema — and Clemens & Spencer. He focused his practice on representing medical device makers, healthcare companies and physician groups who were sued for medical malpractice.
Then came the meeting with Walsdorf and the opportunity to do legal work for Mission. He officially became the company’s general counsel in 2003.
“I welcomed the chance to work with this family-owned company,” Cusenbary told The Texas Lawbook. “I had known several of the family members for many years and was pleased to be able to work with them. I had always had an interest in law based on science and medicine, particularly pharmaceuticals and women’s health. Early in my career, I was involved in drug-related litigation and medical malpractice defense. My wife is a physician, so it gave us many things to talk about over the dinner table.”
His wife, Dr. Teri Hospers, is a retired pediatric cardiologist. (Cusenbary and Dr. Hospers pictured right)
Mission Pharmacal scored some huge legal successes under Cusenbary’s watch, including a 2014 victory in a patent infringement case in the Western District of Texas that validated the company’s dual iron patented formulation — U.S. patent no. 6,521,247 — in the high-quality prenatal vitamin in CitraNatal supplements used by pregnant women.
On the transactional side, Cusenbary said one of his biggest achievements was a large divestiture he led in 2007 when Switzerland-based Bayer Health Care purchased the Citracal line of over-the-counter calcium supplements for an undisclosed amount.
“Citracal was one of Missions’ most successful formulations,” he said. “I was proud of my contribution in supervising compliance efforts, managing litigation risk and communicating with the FDA regarding regulatory compliance.”
Cusenbary said the role of the corporate GC has changed significantly over the years.
“From my perspective, GCs are more involved in the management and growth of companies and are not just limited to legal decisions,” he said. “This made my job much more interesting and enjoyable, as I was involved in many aspects of the management of the company.”
The biggest challenge facing GCs in Texas today is “keeping up with changes in regulatory compliance.”
And he said that general counsel have a responsibility to be the conscience of a corporation.
“If they’re not, they should be,” he said. “The GC sets the tone for ethical behavior at the top. This is the reason why I began producing Ethics Follies — to keep ethical behavior and its positive impact in front of the legal community.”
“In hiring outside counsel, it’s important to ensure the honesty and integrity of the attorneys you hire,” Cusenbary said. “Unethical behavior from outside counsel can be very problematic for the reputation of your company. The biggest mistakes that outside counsel [make] when hired by the GC include poor communication and undocumented billing.”
Cusenbary said that “volunteering for organizations, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Mental Health Association and ACC, helped me realize that I could make a difference in people’s lives with my position as an attorney.”
“ACC played a very important role in my career as an in-house attorney,” he. said. “The relationships that came from being a part of ACC made my work and personal life much more enjoyable. I’m very grateful to [ACC San Antonio Chapter executive director] Amber Clark for her constant support, hard work and friendship.”
Clark said the ACC San Antonio Chapter “simply wouldn’t be what it is today without the vision and contributions of Lee Cusenbary.”
“Since joining in 2003, Lee has been a trusted and generous volunteer leader – always willing to share his time and talents to support any need,” Clark said. “In 2006, he took charge of the chapter’s annual ethics conference and created Ethics Follies® then grew it into a beloved San Antonio tradition – one that has educated thousands of lawyers on the importance of ethics in law and business, elevated our chapter’s profile both locally and nationwide, and helped raise nearly $250,000 for our local pro bono organization.”
Gifford, the Dykema lawyer, said Ethics Follies “became more than an educational program — it grew into a citywide ethics conference.”
“It facilitated and strengthened a deeper mutually beneficial relationship between the San Antonio arts and professional communities, with the former being able to donate time and talent to promoting ethical professional and business behavior and raising funds for local charity, and the latter donating effort and financial resources to promote the arts and creativity,” he said.
“For his decadeslong commitment to the legal profession, his nationally recognized work in ethics education, his contributions to the in-house counsel community, the local theatre community, and his countless hours of public service, Lee Cusenbary is a truly deserving recipient of the Lifetime Achievement award,” Gifford said.
Editor’s Note: All photos courtesy ACC San Antonio Executive Director Amber Clark
Fun Facts: Lee Cusenbary
- Favorite book: The Da Vinci Code. The combination of mystery, science and heart was very appealing to me.
- Favorite movie: Young Frankenstein. It always makes me laugh.
- Favorite vacation: Staying with our family in a castle in Tuscany.
- Favorite restaurant: Bliss. We’ve have many delicious meals with great friends there.
- Hero in life: My wife, Teri Hospers. We’ve been through a lot together, and she still loves me.
Photos from Ethics Follies performances over the years
