Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Kelly Rentzel, former general counsel at Texas Capital, has a new job: general counsel of First Foundation Inc. The emerging California-founded financial services firm is moving to Dallas, and they've tagged Rentzel to help them grow. Natalie Posgate reports.
Scenes from the 2020 DFW/ACC Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards held June 3, 2021 at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
In the first major in-person legal event since the advent of the pandemic, the DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook gathered with some of the top legal talent in Texas at the George W. Bush Institute to honor the best in-house work during an exceptionally difficult year. The Lawbook's founder Mark Curriden has all the results of the 2020 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards.
American Airlines Associate GC Kate Hayashi has faced some challenges during the past 25 years – TWA’s bankruptcy, TWA’s acquisition by American Airlines, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that involved two American jetliners, American’s bankruptcy and restructuring and American’s merger with U.S. Airways. But 2020 was a year unlike any other. But those challenges are why she is one of the most experienced lawyers in the airline industry today.
While most companies battened down the hatches in 2020 in order to weather the Covid-19 pandemic, Dallas-based global cloud-based cybersecurity and productivity solutions company Zix Corporation went searching for opportunities. “We decided that the most resilient businesses continue to grow and continue to build to grow, even under difficult or unusual situations,” said Zix Noah Webster CLO. Last July, Zix discovered the perfect acquisition opportunity – an Israeli-owned company called CloudAlly that focuses on cloud-based data backup and recovery for businesses.
Southwest Airlines attorney Jason Shyung remembers his first trial. He met his client - the owner of a small Sherman construction company being wrongly sued by an employee - only two weeks prior to trial. "He could have lost everything," Shyung said. But Shyung and another young lawyer prevailed in federal court. Six years later, Southwest Airlines called on Shyung in its own potentially devastating crisis, and the young lawyer again prevailed. This is his story.
Meredith Bjorck had a seat at the executive table at HMS for five years and she made the most of it. She resolved all significant existing litigation within the first two years. The company's revenue increased more than 30%, net income climbed more than 300% and the company’s stock price climbed more than 200%. Last winter, in the middle of Covid, Bjork led the deal team in the $3.4 billion sale of HMS. But what a five years it was.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PREMIUM CONTENT The Texas Lawbook, visited with Dawud Crooms about his mentors, pro bono and public service involvement and how he selects outside counsel.
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.
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.
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