Jay Simmons grew up in rural West Tennessee and didn’t know any lawyers at all. His mother was a teacher and his dad a millwright.
As a young man, he envisioned himself teaching college students about great writings, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English language and literature at Stephen F. Austin University. But he quickly realized that “academic life was not for me.”
“My running gag is that law school is the last bastion for failed English majors,” Simmons told The Texas Lawbook. “The truth is, I had no insight into what corporate lawyers even did.”
He knows now. In fact, Simmons is the general counsel of Kraton Corporation, a Houston-based manufacturer of chemicals and polymers, including synthetic replacements for rubber, and has a market cap of $1.1 billion.
During his nine years at Kraton, Simmons has led “tons of rollups,” a handful of M&A deals – including two million-dollar-plus transactions – and several securities offerings and financings. And last year, he and his legal team worked at the Houston Food Bank in the days following Hurricane Katrina to help feed more than 83,000 meals to local residents.
Recognizing his extraordinary successes at Kraton and his contributions to the South Texas community, he was named a finalist for the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel’s General Counsel of the Year Award for a Mid-sized Legal Department.
“I am fortunate to have worked with Jay and the Kraton team for many years and I highly admire Jay for his legal expertise and management style,” wrote Baker McKenzie partner Denmon Sigler in nominating Simmons for the award. “He is a key advisor to the Kraton board and a leader of an exceptional legal department.”
Sigler points out just a few of Simmons major accomplishments, including:
· $1.4 Billion acquisition of Arizona Chemical Holdings Corp. from its private equity owner. The deal allowed Kraton to achieve pretax synergies of $65 million by 2018;
· $2 Billion merger with Taiwan-based LCY Chemical Corp.’s styrenic block polymer operations, which created a $2 billion revenue company.
· A $360 million refinancing transaction that extend the maturity and lower interest expense on a portion of the outstanding indebtedness of Kraton Polymers LLC and Kraton Polymers Capital Corporation, the Company’s wholly- owned subsidiaries.
Simmons said that the most important deal of his career was the 2016 purchase of Arizona Chemical.
“The acquisition doubled the size of the company and doubled our international footprint,” he said. “The scale of the enterprise and the variety of legal issues doubled overnight. When we signed the deal, the debt market was imploding in Q3 2015. It was literally the worst market since the housing bubble burst in 2008, and we were borrowing $1.5 billion.
“So, the business and legal issues in getting the transaction from signing to close were fascinating,” he said. “The post-closing integration of that many new people and locations has been quite a challenging project.”
Simmons went to law school at the University of Houston Law Center.
“Probably the most significant moment for me as a lawyer was a fateful lunch with Bill Porter at the end of my summer clerkship,” he said. “Bill convinced me that I – the failed English major with zero business experience – should be a corporate lawyer.
“I took the plunge and started my career at Porter & Hedges,” he said. “It was one of the better decisions I’ve ever made.”
Simmons spent nearly two years at Porter Hedges and then four years at Haynes and Boone before making the move in-house.
“Probably the most rewarding transaction of my career was a small private equity refinancing of a start-up biotech business in Houston,” he said. “The moment everyone signed the closing papers, the employees were cheering and popping corks and celebrating. It was then and there that I realized how impactful the work is that we do.”