The Texas Lawbook

Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury

Avatar photo

Mark Curriden

Mark Curriden is a lawyer/journalist and founder of The Texas Lawbook.

Mark Curriden

Mark Curriden is a lawyer/journalist and founder of The Texas Lawbook. In addition, he is a contributing legal correspondent for The Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Business Journal.

Mark is the author of the best selling book Contempt of Court: A Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism. The book received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and numerous other honors. He also is a frequent lecturer at bar associations, law firm retreats, judicial conferences and other events. His CLE presentations have been approved for ethics credit in nearly every state.

From 1988 to 1994, Mark was the legal affairs writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he covered the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He authored a three-part series of articles that exposed rampant use of drug dealers and criminals turned paid informants by local and federal law enforcement authorities, which led to Congressional oversight hearings. A related series of articles by Mark contributed to a wrongly convicted death row inmate being freed.

The Dallas Morning News made Mark its national legal affairs writer in 1996. For more than six years, Mark wrote extensively about the tobacco litigation, alleged price-fixing in the pharmaceutical industry, the Exxon Valdez litigation, and more than 25 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Mark also authored a highly-acclaimed 16-part series on the future of the American jury system. As part of his extensive coverage of the tobacco litigation, Mark unearthed confidential documents and evidence showing that the then Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, had made a secret deal with a long-time lawyer and friend in which the friend would have profited hundreds of millions of dollars from the tobacco settlement. As a direct result of Mark’s articles, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation, which led to the indictment and conviction of Mr. Morales.

For the past 25 years, Mark has been a senior contributing writer for the ABA Journal, which is the nation’s largest legal publication. His articles have been on the cover of the magazine more than a dozen times. He has received scores of honors for his legal writing, including the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the American Judicature Society’s Toni House Award, the American Trial Lawyer’s Amicus Award, and the Chicago Press Club’s Headliner Award. Twice, in 2001 and 2005, the American Board of Trial Advocates named Mark its “Journalist of the Year.”

From 2002 to 2010, Mark was the senior communications counsel at Vinson & Elkins, a 750-lawyer global law firm.

Mark’s book, Contempt of Court, tells the story of Ed Johnson, a young black man from Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1906. Johnson was falsely accused of rape, railroaded through the criminal justice system, found guilty and sentenced to death – all in three weeks. Two African-American lawyers stepped forward to represent Johnson on appeal. In doing so, they filed one of the first federal habeas petitions ever attempted in a state criminal case. The lawyers convinced the Supreme Court of the United States to stay Johnson’s execution. But before they could have him released, a lynch mob, aided by the sheriff and his deputies, lynched Johnson. Angered, the Supreme Court ordered the arrest of the sheriff and leaders of the mob, charging them with contempt of the Supreme Court. It is the only time in U.S. history that the Supreme Court conducted a criminal trial.

You can reach Mark at mark.curriden@texaslawbook.net or 214.232.6783.

Q&A: Jeff McNabb of Patterson-UTI

Jeff McNabb’s destiny to be a trial lawyer started in the first grade. Decades later, McNabb is head of litigation for Patterson-UTI Management, where he won two major courtroom victories in 2022 — one against former employees who allegedly took the company’s confidential information and the other involving an insurance coverage dispute for several underlying worksite injuries.



Mark Curriden, founder of The Lawbook, asked McNabb to share some of his thoughts about hiring outside counsel and the role of diversity in whatever he requires.

Q&A: Brookfield’s Fred Day

As managing director of investments at Canadian-based Brookfield Asset Management, Fred Day led six major infrastructure deals last year with a combined dollar value of more than $55 billion, including a $5 billion take-private transaction of British home repair services company HomeServ and the acquisition of a majority ownership in Deutsche Telekom’s tower portfolio in Germany and Austria for more than $19 billion.



Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, asked Day about the role of diversity in his rarefied world of dealmaking.

For Brookfield’s Fred Day, ‘No Fire Drills’ Just Multibillion Dollar Deals   

As a rookie deal lawyer, Fred Day’s first transaction in 2007 was valued at more than $1 billion. In the 15 years since, Day has handled dozens of M&A and capital markets transactions with combined price tags exceeding $100 billion. No year in his career, however, matches the magnitude of 2022.



As managing director at Brookfield Asset Management, Day led six major infrastructure deals last year with a combined dollar value of more than $55 billion, including a $30 billion “first-of-its-kind” JV with Intel Corp. for a semiconductor fabrication facility in Arizona. As a result, Day is a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department.

Vitol’s Averill Conn is at ‘the Intersection of Energy and New Technology’

Averill Conn has spent the past 29 months at Vitol, where she played a key role in the acquisition of three wind farms in Pennsylvania and another in Illinois, the establishment of Vitol’s solar and battery storage development platform, the negotiation of a long-term Renewable Energy Certificates purchase agreement with Meta Inc. in connection with a solar project in California, the negotiation of long-term virtual power and purchase agreements of utility-scale solar facilities in the Northeast involving AT&T and Vitol’s investment in FlexGen Power Systems, a software technology provider for energy storage solutions.

Citing Conn’s extraordinary success, the Houston Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook award the Vitol Associate GC with the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

Eleox GC Becky Gottsegen Helps Energy Giants Work Toward a Common Goal

In the fall 2021, six large North American energy companies that vigorously compete against each other formed a joint venture that used real-time digital technology that would help them resolve certain operational inefficiencies in natural gas post-trade processing. But the new JV, Eleox, needed a GC. They chose Becky Gottsegen.



“One of my strengths is building. I like making things happen,” Gottsegen said. And that is an understatement. She has done everything during her first 16 months — negotiating contracts with business partners, handling antitrust concerns, ensuring cybersecurity and data protection, getting the six energy giants to agree on SaaS agreement terms, filing patent applications, helping pick brand colors and even “finding hip Heights office space.” Gottsegen is also a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department.

Premium Subscriber Q&A: Eleox GC Becky Gottsegen

When they needed a GC for their new joint venture to solve mutual operational inefficiencies, the six energy companies who created Eleox chose Becky Gottsegen. The choice was so successful that Gottsegen is a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department.


Texas Lawbook founder Mark Curriden had the opportunity to ask Gottsegen a few questions about the unusual venture, and what she looks for when hiring outside counsel.

Q&A: Sarah Menendez, BMC Software

For Premium Subscribers BMC Software GC Pat Tagtow and his senior counsel, Sarah Menendez, spent five years litigating and two weeks at trial claiming that competitor but sometimes business partner

Q&A: Patrick Tagtow, BMC Software

For Premium Subscribers BMC Software GC Pat Tagtow and his senior counsel, Sarah Menendez, spent five years litigating and two weeks at trial claiming that competitor but sometimes business partner

BMC Legal Team Needed ‘Sheer Tenacity, Strategy and Endurance’ to Win $1.6B Award

BMC Software GC Pat Tagtow and his senior counsel, Sarah Menendez, spent five years litigating and two weeks at trial claiming that competitor but sometimes business partner IBM made a “material misrepresentation” and acted in “bad faith” during contract negotiations when it agreed to not displace BMC’s products from AT&T’s mainframe systems but did so anyway. There were 52 depositions, 17 expert reports, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced as evidence and more than 950 court docket entries.

But last Memorial Day, Tagtow, Menendez and lead trial lawyer Sean Gorman spent all day checking phone messages and emails every 30 minutes and refreshing PACER to see if the judge had issued his verdict. A billion dollars was at stake. Finally, just as the Menendezes sat down to a dinner of buttermilk brined baked chicken, biscuits and slaw, the decision arrived. This is the story behind the three people who led the litigation and why it is a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.

Sen. Schumer Asks NDTX Chief Judge to Revise Case Assignment Methods

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer sent the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas a letter Thursday asking that he “reform the method of assigning cases” to judges to put an end to forum shopping by litigants. The senator said litigants — especially the Texas Attorney General — have abused NDTX procedures that automatically assign cases to judges who sit in those geographic divisions, including divisions that have only one or two federal judges, in order to “hand-pick individual district judges seen as particularly sympathetic to their claims.”

© Copyright 2025 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.