© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(Aug. 21) – AT&T announced Thursday that Wayne Watts, widely recognized as one of the most influential business lawyers in the U.S., is retiring as general counsel and senior executive vice president.
During his nearly 32 years at AT&T, Watts was directly involved in negotiating dozens of mergers and acquisitions with a combined value of nearly $250 billion. He did the legal work on nearly every deal that transformed Southwestern Bell, the smallest of the Baby Bells, into the world’s largest communications business.
AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson, in a written statement, said that Watts has been “a key leader in transforming AT&T into a mobile, Internet and entertainment company.
“He is without question one of the top legal minds in corporate America, a well-respected and trusted counselor and an outstanding advocate for our customers, our shareowners and our company,” Stephenson said.
Watts oversees one of the largest corporate legal departments in the world. He has more than 600 lawyers working full-time for AT&T and he employs scores of law firms and thousands of lawyers around the globe to represent the company in matters ranging from employment law and patent infringement disputes to regulatory challenges and shareholder litigation.
A 1980 graduate of SMU’s Dedman School of Law, Watts gained a national reputation for aggressively pushing law firms to hire and promote more women and minorities. He insisted his army of corporate in-house lawyers do more pro bono and public service work. He serves on the board of Texas Access to Justice, which provides funding for the poor and indigent needing legal services.
And he publicly decried lawyers who charged too much.
“No lawyer is worth $1,000 an hour. I hate the billable hour,” he told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview earlier this week before he announced his retirement. “I have done as much as I could to kill the billable hour. It gives the wrong incentives to lawyers.”
Watts grew up in southwest Dallas.
“920 South Oak Cliff Boulevard,” he said. “If you look at that house, nobody would have predicted my career.”
Watts said the single biggest influence on his career choice was TV’s Perry Mason.
“I knew I wanted to be a lawyer at 10 years old,” he said. “Lawyers were fighting for people and saving lives.”
Watts joined AT&T on Dec. 19, 1983 when it was Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. He was a rookie lawyer in the litigation department, but moved to the phone company’s mergers and acquisitions team in 1988.
During the 27 years that followed, Watts was directly involved in several billion-dollar deals, including Southwestern Bell’s purchase of Pac-Tel for $16 billion and Southern New England Telephone Co. in 1998 for $4.4 billion. Later that same year, he engineered SBC’s $62 billion merger with Ameritech. In 1999, he led SBC’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Comcast Cellular.
In 2005, SBC purchased AT&T for $16 billion and officially adopted its target’s corporate name. A year later, AT&T acquired BellSouth and Cingular Wireless – now AT&T Mobility – for $66 billion.
Last month, he closed on AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV for $49 billion.
Watts said his biggest disappointment as AT&T’s top lawyer was the company’s inability to close its $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile in 2011.
“That was a very dark day,” he said. “I had a task and I didn’t get it finished. The DirecTV deal made T-Mobile a lot less painful, but I will never get over it.”
© 2015 The Texas Lawbook. Content of The Texas Lawbook is controlled and protected by specific licensing agreements with our subscribers and under federal copyright laws. Any distribution of this content without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.
If you see any inaccuracy in any article in The Texas Lawbook, please contact us. Our goal is content that is 100% true and accurate. Thank you.