Mark Curriden

Seven years ago, Tracy Preston traded in her Levi jeans for Jimmy Choo shoes to become the GC at Neiman Marcus. Last year, she defeated a $1 billion lawsuit brought by a hedge fund, executed a complex transaction that extend the company’s funded debt and played a strategic role in the opening of Neiman Marcus Hudson Yards, the company’s first store in New York City. She has more to come in 2020.

Ashlie Alaman returned home Monday after a four day mission trip to Reynosa, Mexico, which is one of the most dangerous towns on the border. She and seven other women from their church delivered food, clothes, sewing machines to 400 migrants in a shelter hoping for asylum in the U.S. Alaman is a “force of nature” in the pro bono world. “I absolutely love being a lawyer … to help change people’s lives,” she says.

James Sheppard took his first flight on Southwest Airlines when he was a high school freshman. Twenty-five years later, Sheppard is a senior litigation attorney for Southwest who took two major multimillion-dollar lawsuits to trial in California last year and won both of them. This is the story of how he did it.

Navin Rao led Michaels Stores through an IPO, two major acquisitions, the liquidations of its Aaron Brothers and Pat Catan’s store chains and the issuance of a $500 million senior notes offering. But
did you know that Sabrina the Teenage Witch bought Rao drinks? Or that he now has a new GC job? The Texas Lawbook has the details.

Stephanie Zapata Moore has been busy the past couple years. The Vistra GC was instrumental in the company’s spinoff from Energy Future Holdings. It didn’t stop there. Last year, she finalized the integration of the legal and compliance functions related to the Dynegy acquisition, oversaw the purchases of Ambit Energy and Crius Energy Trust and engineered a $1 billion private securities offering. And, of course, there’s the marathon she ran in Fargo, N.D.

Two lawyers – CIA operative-turned-GC Lynne Puckett and associate GC Anne Brooksher-Yen – developed a model to do pro bono projects with two different law firms that they believe will be a roadmap for their relationships with outside counsel on all legal matters going forward. At the core of these creative partnerships is identifying unique opportunities of the corporate legal department with the resources of the law firms to tackle meaningful issues.

AT&T senior counsel Belinda Boling is a pro bono ball of fire. She has handled multiple asylum cases, including a heartbreaking representation of a teenaged girl whose mother’s murdered body was found by the FBI. She recruited more than a dozen other lawyers at AT&T to help asylum-seekers with their applications. She expanded AT&T’s pro bono program to its Latin America offices and joined forces with Akin Gump to help about 2,000 U.S. military veterans get legal assistance.

Ben E. Keith Assistant GC Punam Kaji is the hands-on GC of the future. She walks her company’s food distribution warehouse and rides along with sales people to catch issues before they become problems. Oh, and this is important, she actually cares about the people she works with.

Burton Brillhart won a $3.1 million trade secrets case and a copyright victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. He finalized Bain Capital’s $2.5 billion acquisition of Varsity. But Brillhart’s really good stories are about his grandfather, Homer Dean, a South Texas lawyer for 60 years and a close personal friend of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Dean was the Jim Wells County Attorney in 1948 when the infamous Precinct 13 ballot dispute occurred giving the U.S. Senate election to LBJ. Now that’s news.