Adam Shulman recalls two rules inculcated to him by his father: (1) Anything can be interesting if you look closely enough, and (2) The first step at being good at something is being willing to be terrible at it.
Adam Shulman abides.
Shulman is vice president of corporate global strategy and development at Dallas-based Celanese, a global producer of chemicals and engineered materials critical to the production of things — lots of things.
The chemicals are of the arcane sort with names that require translation, even when their target uses do not: cellulose acetate flake (glasses frames, food packaging); ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (filters, orthopedic implants) and ethylene-vinyl acetate polymer (solar panel protection, wire insulation).
Keep that in mind (as well as Shulman Rule #2) as we discuss the selection of Shulman and Celanese by The Texas Lawbook and the DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel as a finalist for 2025 M&A Transaction of the Year.
The nomination is for the $500 million sale by Celanese of its Micromax subsidiary to Elemental Solutions. The Micromax manufacturing portfolio is one of inks, pastes and ceramic tapes used in high-performance electronics like sensors, touch panels and flexible circuits found in medical devices, smart phones and automobiles.
The divestment was announced in October as part of plan by Celanese to deleverage and focus on what it considered its core manufacturing market. But it was the strategic conception, detailed organization and speed of execution — much of it traceable to Shulman — that won the regard of lawyers involved.
Ryan Bray and Romaine Dambre are partners at A&O Shearman who worked on the deal; Bray in Dallas and Dambre in New York. In their letter nominating Shulman and Celanese they highlighted the diverse elements of the transaction. The deal managed to accommodate the needs of both parties while assuring the continuity of operations and supply chains vital to the Micromax business while surging at breakneck speed toward a Q1 2026 closing.
“Celanese separated assets, contracts and employees across 13 jurisdictions, requiring coordination of local asset and employee transfer mechanics under diverse tax, regulatory and employment regimes,” Bray and Dambre wrote. “The team aligned commercial, operational and legal levers to preserve business continuity and customer service levels during transition, while ensuring clear ownership of intellectual property, data and formulations central to Micromax’s value.”
Micromax came to Celanese as part of an $11 billion acquisition from DuPont. But Micromax was never a comfortable fit for Celanese, making it part problem, part solution and part complexity of said solution.
“Micromax is a terrific business — just not one that we were positioned to grow,” said Shulman. “I have often said that Micromax is a perfect example of what thoughtful M&A looks like. We found a buyer for the business that has tons of expertise in what Micromax does, is excited about investing in it and will help the business and the people reach new heights. It was absolutely the right deal at the right time for us.”
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Adam Shulman discusses the traits he seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with him and more.
At $500 million, the deal wasn’t existential for a corporation with a $5.14 billion market capitalization. But for a company still digesting the $11 billion deal with DuPont alongside the usual complexities associated with corporate carveouts the deal held more than its share of unique tripwires.
As Shulman explains: “Several factors made the Micromax divestiture particularly complex. First, the business came with the DuPont acquisition in 2022 and is very different from the rest of Celanese. We sell railcars of acetic acid while Micromax sells a couple ounces of conductive pastes in a jar for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we were reliant on the excellent Micromax team to provide answers to diligence questions, while also trying to keep the day-to-day operations going during a record year for the business.”
“Second, we ran an unusually wide process with numerous financial and strategic bidders, all of whom did significant diligence into the business. This resulted in enormous stress for both the M&A team and the business itself,” Shulman said.
And like many manufacturing businesses — but particularly with a business like Micromax — there were supply-chain issues.
“The key raw materials in conductive paste are precious metals, which were particularly volatile in 2025,” said Shulman. “That created a number of unique issues that required our team to get up to speed on metals leasing and trading quickly, in order to differentiate how much of the business was highly specialized, best-in-class, industry-leading performance as opposed to just commodity pricing.”
“In some ways it was more complex than larger polymer deals we’ve done since it required us to explain and protect its unique business model,” Shulman said.
Jonathan Whalen, a partner at Gibson Dunn, says that kind of thinking is what distinguishes Shulman’s in-house career.
“Adam strikes a really rare balance between technical legal skills and high-level business strategy,” said Whalen. “On the legal side, he knows M&A structures cold. But what makes him an exceptional in-house counsel is that he doesn’t look at legal issues in isolation. Because he’s transitioned into a business development role while keeping his legal responsibilities, he evaluates every risk based on Celanese’s broader goals.”
“For a lot of in-house counsel, the job is about getting the deal closed. Adam is different because he focuses on how the company has to actually live with the deal for the next 10 years. Since he knows the operations side so well, he catches practical friction points in long-term commercial or supply agreements that a standard M&A lawyer would likely miss,” Whalen said.
Kirkland partner Jennifer Gasser agrees.
“This was an exceedingly complex transaction — a carveout structured as an asset and equity acquisition (led by Kirkland), preceded by an internal reorganization (led by A&O Shearman), and all of that on a global scale, implicating a host of regulatory regimes in foreign jurisdictions,” Gasser said.
“Adam is the difference maker that delivered this fantastic result. He maintained enthusiasm, a constructive attitude and disciplined work throughout the duration of this sale process,” said Gasser. “I have immense respect for the result he delivered and appreciate the grit it took to get there.”
From Haverford to Cavender’s
Shulman was born in Chicago, where his father was an insurance defense lawyer.
“His claim to fame is that shortly before I was born, he found himself on the opposite side from Lynyrd Skynyrd after their 1977 plane crash,” Shulman said. On Oct. 20, 1977, three members of the band and three others died when their chartered Convair 240 ran out of fuel on a flight from South Carolina to Baton Rouge, La.
When he was four, the family moved to Atlanta where his father went in-house as general counsel of a refrigerated warehouse company. Over time he served as CFO and GC at several public companies, a history that seems to have imbued the younger Shulman by osmosis.
He attended Haverford College, an elite Quaker-founded institution on Philadelphia’s Main Line. While earning his J.D. at Duke Law School, he managed to conjure a path between his undergraduate history degree and his increasing interest in business.
“The idea of becoming a lawyer probably settled on me before I fully realized it. Eventually, it became clear that law offered a way to take a liberal arts education and still make an impact in the world of commerce,” Shulman said.
After getting a bar card in New York, he went to work at Willkie Farr & Gallagher where that epiphany became fact.
“I was immediately drawn to M&A when I entered Willkie,” said Shulman. “The idea of problem-solving and relationship-building appealed to me far more than litigation and felt more aligned with my strengths.”
After four years at Willkie, Shulman was lured in-house at a company called Globe Specialty Metals.
“It was 2009. Like many lawyers at the time, I was navigating a rapidly changing legal market. But I knew the company because Willkie had worked on the IPO, and they were looking for someone with (securities reporting) experience, which made it a strong fit for both sides,” says Shulman.
It was another test of Shulman Rule #2.
“Globe Specialty Metals was a small company — a roll-up of silicon smelting companies — and the entire law department was the general counsel and myself,” said Shulman. “In addition to usual duties such as negotiating M&A deals, drafting commercial contracts and handling SEC reporting, I was also responsible for a wide variety of tasks that I had not ever done before — I was sworn into the SDNY to litigate a trademark dispute, I stood up an equipment leasing company, and I lived in Nigeria for four months to negotiate and operate manganese, nickel and tin mines.”
“Needless to say, Duke didn’t offer a class on mining in between Evidence and Torts. However, being consistently out of my depth and learning how to operate effectively anyway convinced me that I wanted to stretch what I could do with my law degree.”
He was still in New York, but he and his wife wanted to expand their family.
“Since both of us are from the suburbs, the idea of raising a child in New York frankly scared the hell out of us. I started looking around for other metals companies that needed junior lawyers. I ended up getting an offer at Celanese in Dallas, having never been to Texas in my life,” said Shulman.
“A month later I was buying cowboy boots at Cavender’s.”
That was in July 2011. And over more than 14 years he’s advanced steadily through a series of jobs involving the legal side of procurement, compliance and business strategy.
Shulman says his best days in-house involve some combination of strategic thinking and operational execution. His remembers his best day at Celanese as one of the days he spent working on the transformational DuPont transaction that brought Micromax into the Celanese fold. He was both the M&A lawyer working on the deal while simultaneously tracking sales deals to generate cash. The realization, he said, was exhilarating.
“Those days made me feel like I was both steering the ship from the bridge and shoveling coal in the boiler room. As an in-house lawyer, it’s hard to imagine a day much better than that.”
He credits other deals that he’s worked on — specifically, the building of the world’s largest methanol plant in 2013 and the 2023 sale to Mitsui of a 70 percent share of the Celanese food ingredients business — as mileposts in his personal business education, teaching him the value of honesty and of understanding the other side of the table.
To that end, he says he’s also worked to expand the role of the Celanese sales staff in the crafting of contracts as a way of fostering a similar appreciation between the operational and legal sides of the business.
“I wanted salespeople to engage more actively with legal terms rather than simply tossing them to the lawyers to fight over,” he said. “This required buy-in from our senior leaders, which was happily forthcoming, and I believe has resulted in better contracts for the business and more engaged salespeople.”
He said weighing his own limitations allows him, conversely, to assess and develop his professional strengths.
“I must admit that my Excel skills are not my strongest suit, and our head of accounting has shown heroic patience explaining weighted average cost of capital to me. However, I have learned that the skills developed as an in-house lawyer — judgment, negotiation, knowing what matters and what doesn’t and allocating risk accordingly — have translated well into managing the broader aspects of a transaction,” said Shulman.
And so, we return to Shulman the Elder and Rule #2.
“This role has really tested my father’s assertion that curiosity and humility can carry you through, and it has reinforced the importance of building and relying on exceptional teams. Obviously, without a solid team of incredible financial and M&A experts working with me, I would never have been able to transition into this position with any success.”
Fun Facts: Adam Shulman
- Favorite book: The Power Broker by Robert Caro. I know it’s a popular pick, but I read it when I was living in New York and I couldn’t put it down. Still the best book about how power is wielded in America.
- Favorite music group: The Mountain Goats
- Favorite movie: Back to the Future
- Favorite restaurant and food at that restaurant: Anything smothered in voodoo sauce at Neighborhood Services.
- Favorite beverage: At a bar, my go-to order is an old fashioned, hold the cherry. But the technically accurate answer is a Mexican Coke, straight from the bottle (you’ll recall I grew up in Atlanta). When considering places to move from NYC, one of Dallas’s advantages was greater access to Mexican Coke.
- Favorite vacation ever: After lockdown, we decided to go big. So my wife, daughter and I spent 10 days in Egypt in August 2022. People questioned our sanity, but it was literally cooler at the Giza pyramid complex that week than it was in Dallas.
- Hero in life: A former boss who taught me that good legal leadership is about building relationships and trust — you can’t provide good counsel unless they want you in the room first.