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Mark Curriden

Mark Curriden is a lawyer/journalist and founder of The Texas Lawbook. In addition, he is a contributing legal correspondent for The Dallas Morning News.

Mark Curriden

Mark Curriden is a lawyer/journalist and founder of The Texas Lawbook. In addition, he is a contributing legal correspondent for The Dallas Morning News.

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.

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.

Mark Curriden

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.”

Mark Curriden

Raymond Chang ‘Takes Extreme Ownership of Everything’ at DNOW

DistributionNOW GC Raymond Chang and his colleagues noticed a wave of sudden worker departures at its Odessa Pumps business. A speedy internal investigation was followed by a quick lawsuit in which the global supplier of oil and gas drilling equipment and parts accused an Odessa businessman and other former workers of stealing confidential information and trade secrets. The case went to trial five months later ending with a jury unanimously finding in DNOW's favor and awarding $9 million in damages.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Chang as the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department. This is his story.

Mark Curriden

Q&A: Raymond Chang

For Premium Subscribers: When Raymond Chang noticed in the spring 2022 that a wave of key workers at DistributionNOW were leaving in a “coordinated mass exodus,” he felt the need to investigate. That investigation revealed that the employees, including a senior executive, were planning to create a competitive venture using stolen company property. The result was a lawsuit that resulted in a $9 million jury verdict. .

Lawbook founder Mark Curriden asked Chang, has been named 2022 ACC General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department, about his experience, what he looks for in outside counsel and his other successes at DistributionNOW.

Mark Curriden

Premium Q&A: Dionne Hamilton, GC, Honeywell Smart Energy and Thermal Solutions

Dionne Hamilton is general counsel at Honeywell Smart Energy and Thermal Solutions, a unit of the global conglomerate Honeywell International. She advises senior corporate leadership on all legal issues, new regulatory activities and geopolitical subjects that impact operations, works on M&A and joint ventures and manages all aspects of the legal budget.

Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, had a recent chance to discuss that experience with Hamilton.

Mark Curriden

Honeywell’s Dionne Hamilton: ‘’Pragmatic Leader with an Uncanny Ability to Demand Respect’

Honeywell Smart Energy GC Dionne Hamilton has scored several successes during her 30 months on the job, including leading the legal department’s role in the company’s launch of revolutionary gas meter technology that monitors residential and commercial activities in real time and stops incidents before they occur. She advises senior corporate leadership on all legal issues, new regulatory activities and geopolitical subjects that impact operations, works on M&A and joint ventures and manages all aspects of the legal budget. Hamilton is also national leader on DEI.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named the UT Law graduate a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

Mark Curriden

Bill Moss is Talos Energy’s ‘Quarterback’

For nearly all of 2022 and the first few months of 2023, Talos Energy GC Bill Moss guided the Houston company through the negotiations and highly complex $1.1 billion acquisition of EnVen, a fellow deep-water operator in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was a difficult deal to get done,” said Moss, who has corporate law in his DNA.

Citing the complexity of the deal, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named the Talos acquisition, led by Moss and Vinson & Elkins as outside counsel, as a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year. This article looks at the Talos acquisition and the GC behind it.

Mark Curriden

Fifth Circuit Nominee Irma Ramirez ‘Devoted to Following the Law’

Irma Jean Carillo was 15 and a sophomore in high school in rural West Texas when she started thinking about becoming a lawyer.

“I refused to take home economics. I took speech and debate instead,” she told the Dallas Bar Association in 2022. “The idea of extemporaneously speaking and debating and getting to argue with the teacher was so much fun. Doing the research and making sure that we prepared the arguments. It was so much fun.”

Four decades later, Irma Carillo Ramirez is a U.S. magistrate in Dallas and likely to soon be the first Hispanic woman to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Mark Curriden

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