Carter Walker Dugan was destined to be a corporate lawyer – a partner at Fulbright & Jaworski to be specific.
As a little girl, she frequently spent time with her grandfather, James Kerr, and played in his office high atop Fulbright Tower in downtown Houston.
Today, Dugan is an energy litigation partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, officing only a few floors away from where she played as a kid.
“I always knew that I wanted to work at Fulbright because my grandfather was a partner here,” she says. “I grew up in a small town and, as a little girl, we would come to the big city and I would spend weekends in the office with him. I very much went to law school knowing that I wanted to come back to Houston and practice at the place where I grew up. It has been a decision that I never regretted.”
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A 2006 graduate of New York University Law School, Dugan grew up in Victoria, where her father, Ron Walker, owns a small business law firm and represents companies in various sorts of commercial litigation matters. She says her earliest knowledge of lawyers came from her father, grandfather and TV.
“When I was growing up, the big show was Matlock,” she says. “Matlock had a daughter as well, and she was the sharper of the two, frankly. I grew up really wanting to be her.”
“I grew in [my dad’s] office making binders for him, sitting through jury trials and going through juror lists,” says Dugan, who is 38 and the mother of three. “Certainly, Matlock resonated with me for that reason.”
Just like Matlock, Walker was “the type of lawyer that whatever walks through the door, he handled it and he handled it beautifully,” she says. “When I say I’m from Victoria, Texas, and my dad is a lawyer there, I can’t tell you the number of times people have said, ‘Is Ron Walker your dad?’ Yes.”
Walker is also a director of the Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, while Dugan’s mother, Kay, is involved in several charities and access to education efforts and served as president of the Victoria Regional Museum Association. In 1993, Texas Gov. Ann Richards appointed Kay Walker to the board of regents with the University of Houston.
While Dugan says her father is her hero, she wanted to follow in the steps of her grandfather – her mother’s father – in Big Law.
James Kerr was a 1939 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. He joined Fulbright in 1950 and became a partner in 1958, practicing corporate securities, tax and antitrust law with Fulbright for more than four decades. His clients included the Texas Medical Center, First Presbyterian Church and a handful of oil and gas companies.
“I was just a young granddaughter, [and John] Crooker Jr. and [Walter] Morrison and all of these giants in the legal industry were always so kind when I would visit,” Dugan says. “They would bring me sugar cookies in his office.
“When I was a summer associate, Mr. Morrison would come down and take me to go get a cookie and coffee like he had done when I was a little girl,” she says.
Dugan was 14 when her grandfather died in 1995. She remembers seeing all the Fulbright partners sitting in one section at the funeral and being honorary pallbearers.
“That really made an impression on me,” she says. “I realized what a neat career he really had.”
Dugan has a clock on her desk that the law firm gave to her grandfather on his 50th anniversary with the firm.
As much as Dugan provides an opportunity to look back at Fulbright’s history, she is also a vision of its future.
While attending law school at NYU, she called the head of recruiting for Fulbright and “graciously invited myself to the Christmas party for 1Ls.’
“Luckily the recruiter said ‘Come on,’” she says.
After two back-to-back summer clerkships at Fulbright, she joined the firm as an associate in 2006.
In 2012, Dugan gave birth to twins, which presented the law firm with both challenges and opportunities.
“At that time, big law firms didn’t really have flexible work programs,” she says. “The twins were sick when they were born, and I came to the firm and I basically said, ‘I want to be there for their doctor appointments and I also want to be a lawyer at this firm. Is there something we can do?’
“I worked for these great lawyers,” she says. “They looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know if we can do that – no one has ever done that – but we will figure it out.’”
Dugan was one of the first associates on the flexible time program and the firm allowed her to “stay on the partnership track with no blip on the radar,” says Dugan, who is now a flex-time partner and serves on the firm’s Associate Evaluation Committee and Futures Committee.
“The firm has always been willing to accommodate and retain female lawyers,” she says. “We now have a very fulsome and formal flexible work program. It is a tribute to the firm that they’ve really grown with it over the years.”
As for Dugan’s grandfather, James Kerr, she says he “would be shocked and thrilled that Fulbright is now a global law firm” and that she followed his footsteps as a partner.