Q&A: Shonn Brown
PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, talked to Brown about her best day at Kimberly-Clark, steering an essential business through the pandemic and diversity in the legal profession.
Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
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 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.

PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, talked to Brown about her best day at Kimberly-Clark, steering an essential business through the pandemic and diversity in the legal profession.
The largest business immigration law firm in Texas is expanding into Dallas-Fort Worth. Houston-based Foster LLP announced Thursday that it has acquired Elise Healy + Associates, which also specializes in representing large and mid-sized companies in a host of immigration-related employment matters.

In the middle of Covid and locked down at home, Match Group CLO Jared Sine guided a massively complex $30 billion reverse corporate spin-off, settled a highly contentious IP lawsuit with competitor Bumble and negotiated a $1.7 billion acquisition of South Korea-based Hyperconnect.
Sine made news last month when he told U.S. Senators about anticompetitive practices of Apple and Google regarding their domination of the app platform space.
“And yes, we are fighting the two biggest and most powerful companies in the history of the world,” he said. “All in a day’s work.”

PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, talked to Sine about his biggest challenges during his nearly five-year tenure at Match and his pet peeves with outside counsel.

For Yuki Whitmire, it was the perfect storm, though at times it may have felt like the Bermuda Triangle. Last March, the securities and corporate transactional lawyer accepted a new job as Vistra Energy’s associate general counsel and corporate secretary with a start date in early April. In those few weeks in between, Covid-19 hit. But Whitmire, who has still never stepped inside her office at work, has done such an amazing job that she is the 2020 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year for a Mid-sized Legal Department. This is the story of her first year at Vistra.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, PREMIUM CONTENT Vistra Energy, like nearly every company during the pandemic, sent their employees home to work remotely. At the same time one of their new hires, Yuki Whitmire was moving with her family into a new house. What happened over the next year proved remarkable, and in a special Q&A, Yuki spoke with Mark Curriden about what she learned from the experience.
A multi-day trial between a Japanese internet media giant and a Chinese technology conglomerate over the patent rights to popular online games ended Friday with a federal jury in Marshall awarding $92 million.

Ashley Yen was in kindergarten when she drew a picture of herself in the future: a stick figure of herself in a suit and glasses holding a briefcase, “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” said Yen, who is associate in-house counsel and assistant vice president at Methodist Health System. She is one of the youngest and arguably the most important in-house counsel in North Texas in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic. Because of Yen, Methodist was one of the first hospitals in DFW to administer the vaccine.
Premium Subscriber Content From the day the Center for Disease Control issued its initial coronavirus warning for U.S. hospitals, Methodist Health System need to lean on its youngest vice president. Ashley Yen and her legal team responded, answering and engaging the plethora of legal issues and regulatory procedures critical to dealing with a global pandemic. Mark Curriden had the opportunity to discuss those challenges and a variety of other issues in a special Q&A.

American Airlines GC Priya Aiyar may be the smartest lawyer in corporate America. So say lawyers and executives who watched her in action during the pandemic. She clerked for Judge Merrick Garland and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. She's been the GC of the U.S. Treasury and a chief legal advisor at the FCC. Every bit of those smarts were needed to address the plethora of legal issues American faced during the past year.
“Priya has no ceiling,” AA Executive VP Stephen Johnson said. “If she remains in the airline industry, the industry will experience a revolution in operations and Priya will be a key reason for that evolution. She is unlike any other lawyer who has ever worked in the airline industry.”© Copyright 2026 The Texas Lawbook
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