Heather Randall joined Dallas-headquartered cloud-based software solutions company Trintech in August 2023 and immediately found herself immersed in one of the biggest challenges of her two-decade legal career.
Just a month earlier, Trintech had completed its largest-ever acquisition — a $230 million purchase of Fiserv’s fintech and payment-solutions operations. The integration of the highly complex carveout transaction was just as complicated, and it fell to Randall to make significant parts of it work.
“Most of my first six months plus some was spent integrating over 400 blue chip global customers into Trintech’s existing customer base, navigating through complex contracts, technical and customer transitions,” Randall told The Texas Lawbook. “This monumental task not only expanded our market reach, but also expanded our customer relationships in the financial industry vertical. The second challenge would be the internal use of AI. Our PE group is requiring the use of AI to drive efficiency and productivity. We created a tactical team to allow for its use in a compliant and low-risk manner, which required creating policies, processes and regular training as well as enterprise tools vetted for security and privacy.”
The challenges and successes continued into 2025. Her achievements include:
- Developing and implementing internal governance frameworks that define how employees interact with artificial intelligence tools;
- Implementing an AI-based software technology solution to track and organize the contracts of Trintech’s thousands of global customers, which streamlined operations and led to significant ongoing efficiency gains;
- Establishing a formal strategic sourcing function to centralize and optimize procurement processes;
- Implementing standardized procedures and building cross-functional collaboration between legal, finance and operations, which eliminated bottlenecks and reduced operational overhead; and
- Successfully suing Fiserve in January 2025 for making misrepresentations during the due diligence period before the purchase and sale agreement was executed in July 2023 regarding “the material reduction of nearly a dozen contracts and misrepresented — or worse, manipulated — financial information relating to at least half a dozen customers.”
“Heather’s expertise in commercial transactions, litigation and compliance have shaped Trintech’s overall global strategy,” said Michelle Hartmann, managing partner of Baker McKenzie’s operations in Texas. “Her legal oversight helped define ethical guardrails and auditability measures for AI-driven features, helping to ensure that innovation does not outpace regulatory readiness. This dual focus — internal enablement and external product compliance — solidified Heather’s role as a trusted advisor at the intersection of technology, legal strategy and corporate integrity and has served as a model for other companies world-wide.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook have named Randall as one of three finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department (two to five attorneys). The finalists will be honored and the winners announced on Jan. 29 at the DFW Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony.
“There is so much more to say about Heather’s commitment to Trintech and her leadership abilities, including her taking leadership over the RFP [request for proposal] team, leading efforts to break down silos in the company, building cross-collaborative teams within the company, and working proactively to enhance the company’s cybersecurity policies in connection with the InfoSec team,” said Hartmann, who nominated Randall for the award. “Suffice it to say that Heather deserves recognition for her specialization in building high-growth teams and fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.”
Trintech CEO Darren Heffernan said Randall “has been a force multiplier for Trintech” by “bridging legal strategy with technological innovation in a way that’s not just rare, but essential to our growth.”
“From architecting our AI governance framework to modernizing contract systems and elevating our RFP capabilities, Heather delivers clarity in complexity,” Heffernan said. “Her leadership goes beyond legal excellence. She’s reshaped how we operate, how we innovate and how we win. Whether it’s optimizing procurement or driving cross-functional efficiency, Heather brings both vision and precision. She’s not just part of our executive team, she’s helping define the future of Trintech.”
Jamil Alibhai, a shareholder at Munsch Hardt, attributes Randall’s excellence as a general counsel to “ her knowledge of Trintech’s business and close working relationship with the senior leadership of Trintech.”
“This provides her the ability to help make business decisions in addition to managing litigation risks,” said Alibhai, who represented Trintech in the litigation against Fiserve earlier this year. “Her day-to-day involvement and understanding of the transaction and business assisted in prosecuting the case as well as resolving it quickly.”
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Heather Randall discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Randall was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but her father’s work took the family to Austin when she was 5 years old. She would stay in Austin from kindergarten through college and law school at the University of Texas.
She started college seeking a major in ballet, but shifted to forensic psychology, which she attributes to “the Silence of the Lambs era.” During her junior year at UT, she decided law school would be her path.
After earning her law degree in 1999, Randall went to work at Haynes Boone in its securities litigation practice, where she represented companies in securities class action lawsuits and companies and their officers and directors in breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits in Texas and Delaware.
“As part of my practice at Haynes and Boone, the team had to embed themselves within a company to learn their business, practices, process and procedures to adequately defend their actions in the lawsuits which could take six to nine months before a motion to dismiss or summary judgement was filed,” she said. “Then we would move on to the next client and start over. I really enjoyed working for one client.”
With the taste for in-house practice acquired, Randall made a career jump from the law firm to TrinityRail in 2005 and then to its parent company, Trinity Industries, where she served for a dozen years as deputy GC for litigation and then vice president of legal.
In 2007, Randall’s father died from cancer.
“Between his diagnosis and death, it was only two weeks,” she said. “I was shocked that in 2007 cancer could be missed by the doctors so badly. There were signs before that in hindsight many doctors ignored or did not look into further. I became heavily involved in philanthropies, raising money for cancer awareness and research.”
Randall’s charity efforts include:
- Co-chairing the Texas Children’s Cancer Fund in 2023;
- Co-chairing the Cattle Baron’s Ball in 2020 and 2021, which was the largest single-night fundraiser for the American Cancer Society;
- Chairing the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s St. Valentine’s Day Fashion Show and Luncheon in 2017; and
- Co-chairing the Ronald McDonald House’s Under the Moonlight Ball.
In 2017, AT&T hired Randall as its senior legal counsel for litigation, where she led the company’s 5G evolution litigation, which involved alleged false advertising violations.
“We successfully defended the company in that litigation, and we were allowed to continue to advertise,” she said. “As a result, I was moved to be the lead advertising attorney for its mobility business segment. Once AT&T decided to spin off DirecTV with a private equity group, I was asked to be the VP over product and advertising in the spin-off and to build a corresponding team to support such.”
In 2023, Trintech came calling.
“The opportunity to be a CLO of a private equity-backed global company brought me to Trintech,” she said. “My role has allowed me to participate not only in tactical efforts and solutions, but allows me to take part in the company’s overall strategy and vision as part of the executive leadership team. I enjoy having a seat at the table to influence and weigh in on business-critical decisions.”
Randall said her biggest accomplishment at Trintech has been “building a highly functional and collaborative global legal team, as well as expanding the legal department by adding RFP and strategic sourcing to its responsibilities and improving both productivity and efficiency of each.”
Erika Bright, a partner at Wick Phillips, has known Randall for more than 20 years. “In all of those years, I have known Heather to be talented, determined, fully plugged-in and a major contributor to getting things done. She does not passively hand over matters to outside counsel. She is actively involved in strategy and is not afraid to make decisions.”
Dallas lawyer James Greer of the Randall Greer law firm said Randall has “guided the company through a transformational period.”
“Heather possesses an innate and extraordinary gift: that of swift discernment as to what is truly outcome determinative in a complex litigation or business environment,” Greer said. “In the maelstrom of high-stakes disputes — with their inherent forensic stress and binary upsides and downsides — Heather’s capacity to separate critical issues from the secondary or irrelevant is unparalleled. Heather’s tactical acumen and decisiveness define her.”
Greer points out that Trintech has achieved record-breaking sales bookings and more than 20-percent year-over-year growth, including adding a strategic partnership with Workday.
“At her core, Heather is driven by relationships,” he said. “She will relentlessly support, defend and advance the causes of the people on her professional teams and within the orbit of her personal relationships — even at expense to herself. This is a fact potentially lost on those whose only exposure to Heather comes when she is steering her clients through difficult situations. Her loyalty and commitment to the people around her are the animating forces behind her professional excellence.”
Fun Facts: Heather Randall
- Favorite music group: Don’t really have one, but I love country music.
- Favorite movie: I love Christmas movies. Christmas Vacation, Elf — we watch them as a family every year at Christmas time.
- Favorite restaurant: Biernat’s on Oak Lawn — Filet.
- Favorite beverage: Topo Chicos — I order boxes at a time.
- Favorite vacation: Cabo — we go a couple of times a year. My happy place.