From Hippies and Shetland Ponies to Fritos and Class Action Wins – PepsiCo’s Leanne Oliver’s Lifetime of Achievement

From developing and implementing a cutting-edge medical leave policy and creating a groundbreaking management training program on sexual harassment to winning major class action lawsuits and leading strategic corporate acquisitions, PepsiCo Foods North America GC Leanne Oliver has spent the past 25 years having an enormous impact on the company’s 300,000 workers and the Texas legal community.

“Leanne has brought enormous value to the company and to the entire legal profession," said former PepsiCo GC Larry Thompson. “No one really knows PepsiCo as well as Leanne.”

June 1, 2021 Mark Curriden

Arash Mostafavipour, New CLO at Tabani Group

The commercial real estate-focused Tabani Group has hired a new chief legal officer – former Capital One financial services division chief counsel Arash Mostafavipour. “I love deal-making and they are always doing deals and looking at new deals,” Mostafavipour said. “It is a fast-moving and acquisitive operation.”

June 1, 2021 Mark Curriden

Jim Phillips Helps Keep PMG “Growing and Successful” in the Covid Era

Less than two years ago, Fort Worth-based PMG hired Jim Phillips to create and build its legal department from scratch. He now supports all agency business units, which signs more than 200 media and real estate contracts a month. At age 34, Phillips regularly finds himself across the proverbial table from lawyers at Google, Apple and Facebook negotiating digital ad contracts in one of the fast-evolving business models in the economy. And he established procedures to ensure compliance with data privacy and FTC regulations - all during "an extraordinarily challenging year.”

May 30, 2021 Mark Curriden

CEC’s David Deck Already Had a Full Plate, then Came Covid-19 and Chapter 11

David Deck’s list of job responsibilities as vice president of legal and compliance at CEC Entertainment was pretty extensive pre-Covid-19. He supervised the litigation docket, oversaw labor and employment issues, handled franchising, contracts with suppliers, intellectual property and compliance issues for Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza restaurants. When the pandemic hit, Deck put together a database that tracks the latest federal, state and local regulations and health standards for the jurisdictions of CEC’s 741 restaurants. – a massive project that he undertook without being asked."[David] lives, bleeds and breathes for this company," said CEC GC Rudy Rodriguez.

May 27, 2021 Mark Curriden

Elizabeth Ramirez-Washka: Fostering DEI Values at the Boy Scouts

Elizabeth Ramirez was 11 when her grandmother suffered a serious slip-and-fall injury while working as a custodian. Her grandmother spoke no English. No lawyer would take her case because they didn't speak Spanish and couldn't understand what happened. "I knew at that moment that I wanted to be an attorney so I could help others,” Ramirez-Washka said. Four decades later, she is the associate GC with the Boys Scouts of America and making a huge difference.

May 27, 2021 Mark Curriden

Dennis Reinhold, Aventiv Help Prisoners During Covid Connect with Their Loved Ones

Many lawyers and corporate general counsel have Covid-19 pandemic experiences, but none have the story that Dennis Reinhold does. As GC of Aventiv Technologies for 15 years, Reinhold led more than 20 M&A deals that transformed the business into the premier prison and jail communications and technology company, which has quintupled in size. But in 2020, he played a critical role in allowing tens of thousands of families across the U.S. have much needed remote contact with their incarcerated relatives. And he helped pioneer a program that reduces recidivism and crime.

May 25, 2021 Mark Curriden

Komen GC Eunice Nakamura – ‘Wired to Be a Lawyer’

For the past year, Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation GC Eunice Nakamura has led a team of lawyers from law firms such as DLA Piper in fundamentally restructuring Komen through a series of 61 corporate transactions that brings Komen affiliates around the U.S. under the HQ's full control.

May 24, 2021 Mark Curriden

7-Eleven’s Dawud Crooms Leads $21B Deal ‘Soup to Nuts’

It was a week ago Thursday at 11:30 p.m. Dawud Crooms' cell phone buzzed. "There's an issue holding it up," the caller told the 7-Eleven senior counsel. It was the Dallas-based convenience store chain’s $21 billion acquisition of Speedway. “It’s not an M&A if something doesn’t pop up at the last minute that threatens the whole deal,” Crooms laughs. This is the story of Crooms, a 38-year-old Morehouse alum who worked with dozens of lawyers and bankers for more than a year through a pandemic from the bedroom of his four kids to get one of the biggest M&A deals of the year completed.

May 21, 2021 Mark Curriden

Q&A: Dawud Crooms

PREMIUM CONTENT The Texas Lawbook, visited with Dawud Crooms about his mentors, pro bono and public service involvement and how he selects outside counsel.

May 21, 2021 Mark Curriden

Forterra GC and Sidley Team Take ‘Holistic Approach’ in Winning $100M Earnout Dispute

Mergers and acquisitions that end up in high-stakes litigation are often about two issues: the fine print of the transaction agreement and the intent of the buyers and sellers. No one knows this more than Forterra GC Lori Browne, who spent the past six years battling the German company that sold the water and drainage pipe maker to private equity fund Lone Star for $1.3 billion on Christmas Eve 2014. Browne won the case and the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.

May 19, 2021 Mark Curriden

Q&A: Lori Browne

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.

May 19, 2021 Mark Curriden

Southwest’s Mark Shaw: ‘Breadth of Issues the Past Year was Unimaginable’

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.

May 17, 2021 Mark Curriden

Q&A: Mark Shaw

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.

May 17, 2021 Mark Curriden

Kimberly-Clark’s Shonn Brown: ‘Using the Same System, Same Practices Yields the Same Results’

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.

May 14, 2021 Mark Curriden

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.

May 14, 2021 Mark Curriden

Match’s Jared Sine – ‘Not your Everyday $30B Reverse Spin-off’

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.”

May 12, 2021 Mark Curriden

Q&A: Jared Sine

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.

May 12, 2021 Mark Curriden

‘It was like Lord of the Flies’

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.

May 10, 2021 Mark Curriden

Q&A: Yuki Whitmire

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.

May 10, 2021 Mark Curriden

Methodist’s Ashley Yen Excels in a Challenging Year for Healthcare

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.

May 7, 2021 Mark Curriden