Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
FOR PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS Forterra GC Lori Browne spent six years battling the German company that on Christmas Eve 2014 sold the water and drainage pipe maker to private equity fund Lone Star for $1.3 billion. Texas Lawbook founder Mark Curriden had the opportunity to speak with Browne about what she looks for when hiring outside counsel, how her job evolved during those six years of litigation and what personal experiences have have most impacted her life.
Mark Shaw has seen a lot of crises during his 21 years as a lawyer at Southwest Airlines, but nothing like the Covid-19 pandemic. Shaw and his legal team were front and center in dealing with nearly all aspects of the pandemic. Critical were multiple securities offerings, convertible notes and federal loans and grants from the federal government that allowed Southwest to raise an extraordinary $18.5 billion in capital in a period of a few months - moves that allowed the airline to avoid drastic budget cuts.
PREMIUM CONTENT Mark Shaw has seen his share of crises. Maybe more than his share. Mark Curriden, founder of The Texas Lawbook, grabbed an opportunity to chat with Shaw about what he looks for when hiring a law firm: what he values most in making those decisions, as well as what turns him off in working with other lawyers.
Shonn Brown was 12 years old and walking home from school when a car of white men called her the N-word and sprayed her with orange soda. Fast-forward 35 years – a Friday night last May – Brown learned that a Sonic manager threatened to call the police on her 17-year-old son and his friends – all African American – if they didn’t leave the premises.
“This is my life. This is my Black son’s life. This is our reality,” Brown wrote on Facebook. Now a year later, Brown, a highly successful commercial trial lawyer and deputy GC at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, has become one of the strongest voices for diversity and inclusion in Texas. This is her story.
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.
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