In the world of large corporations, just a handful of truly mega-complex, multibillion-dollar, multi-jurisdictional litigations have ever existed.
The plethora of lawsuits and disputes that resulted from the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill was clearly one of them.
Amber Shushan was a senior counsel at a law firm representing Transocean, which owned the 2010 BP-operated Macondo Prospect. The litigation involved some of the biggest corporations in the world. The plaintiffs ranged from the State of Texas, the Mexican government and literally thousands of businesses and municipalities which claimed they were negatively impacted by the disaster. More than $20 billion in damages and fines were issued.
PetroChina International, one of the world’s largest oil companies, has taken advantage of this industry-rocking litigation. Not only did the Beijing-based energy company have nothing to do with the Gulf Coast disaster, but it now benefits from all the knowledge and lessons learned by Shushan, who was hired as the company’s senior in-house counsel four years ago.
PetroChina, which employs more than 300,000 people worldwide and has a market cap of nearly $200 billion, has already profited from Shushan’s experience. Since she joined the company in 2015, she has helped navigate PetroChina through multiple sensitive situations and issues that have allowed the energy giant to avoid trouble, including:
- Guiding PetroChina through complex cargo contamination and quality claims which resulted in a multimillion recovery for the business;
- Leading the company through more than 20 contractual disagreements which resulted in no litigation or government investigations;
- Preparing and helping implement internal training compliance and best practice programs on a wide variety of subjects, including anti-corruption education; and
- Assuming a larger role in managing the business’ health, safety and environmental efforts, including leading a spill drill and developing an improved hurricane preparedness initiative with lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina.
Jingxia Wu, director of PetroChina’s law operations, nominated Shushan for the 2019 Houston Corporate Counsel Award’s Senior Legal Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
“I was surprised, humbled and honored,” Shushan said when she learned that her boss had nominated her for the honor. “It is a privilege to serve on her team. Every day is exciting when working for a company that is a part of one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world and helps supply energy to China’s 1.4 billion people.”
Born and raised in New Orleans, Shushan was the first lawyer in her family. Her father was an accountant and her mother worked for Martin Marietta.
“My parents and sister are math and science focused, but I had no interest in math,” she said.
Shushan went to college at Louisiana State University and law school at Tulane University, where she received her law degree in 1996.
“I became attracted to the legal profession during college,” she said. “While majoring in history and preparing for my senior thesis, I studied the Magna Carta and other early written legal codes and systems. It was fascinating. I also enjoyed researching, persuasive writing and working with others. I thought that becoming a lawyer would match my skill sets and interests.”
Shushan spent two years practicing at Dennis, Corry, Porter & Gray in Atlanta and then two years at another Georgia litigation boutique, Gray, Henrick & Edenfield.
An early defining moment in Shushan’s legal career came in 1998, when she was deposing a man who suffered a brain injury on a construction site. Opposing counsel was aggressively leading his witness with answers.
“Instead of confronting the lawyer in front of his client and on-the-record, I asked the lawyer to step into the hallway and told him I would take action if he continued,” she said. “A few days later, the lawyer called my managing partner to say how much he appreciated the way I handled the situation, and that it really threw him off his game.
“I have never minded being under-estimated as a young, southern girl,” she said.
In 2000, she took her legal practice to the Atlanta offices of the global law firm Jones Day, where she spent 11 years handling multidistrict complex litigation, toxic tort disputes and conducting internal investigations for corporate clients.
Shushan moved to Houston in 2011, where she joined Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan – now Eversheds Sutherland. Two of the law firm’s partners, Rachel Clingman and Steve Roberts, had been hired by Transocean to represent the world’s second largest offshore drilling contractor in the Deepwater Horizon litigation.
Almost as soon as she joined Sutherland, she was added to the Transocean defense team.
“The Deepwater Horizon litigation was so complex, mainly because there were so many aspects to it,” she said. “One of the allegations was by the government of Mexico, which claimed that oil from the spill had reached its shores.”
But Shushan and the defense team were able to show multiple examples of Mexican officials touting the fact in public that no oil has tarnished its beaches in hopes that vacationers would visit.
The federal courts consolidated all the litigation against Transocean and the other defendants into one courtroom, which belonged to U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of New Orleans.
This gave Shushan home court advantage. She worked in the courtroom with Roberts and Clingman for phase one of the trial, which lasted several months.
“In Macando, we were working with lawyers from all over the world, and they needed our help on just about everything, including the New Orleans’ pronunciation of French names,” she said.
In August 2015, PetroChina hired Shushan to be one of three lawyers for its U.S. operations in Houston. One of her favorite parts of her position is working on global commodities-trading issues with her colleagues at PetroChina.
“Some of the highlights of my work, in addition to handling disputes and supporting transactions, includes helping the company to navigate changing geopolitical impacts on global trade and assisting [PetroChina’s] compliance department in helping to build procedures and training modules to guide the company through the ever-evolving legal landscape applicable to commodities trading.”
The Deepwater Horizon case aside, Shushan said one of the highlights of her career was working with a team of lawyers at Sutherland on the pro bono Clemency Project, which was created in 2014 as a joint initiative by the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and three other civil rights groups.
“I worked with the firm’s team in advocating for the release of an inmate who had served 25 years behind bars after his sentence to life without parole for selling crack,” she said. “I had the privilege of calling him to tell him that the clemency petition was successful and that he would soon be released.”