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GCs/Corp. Legal Depts.

Jeff McNabb: Patterson-UTI’s ‘Offensive Coordinator’

Jeff McNabb’s destiny to be a trial lawyer started in the first grade when his teacher conducted an impromptu trial and appointed McNabb to represent a fellow student involved in a playground argument. Now decades later, McNabb is head of litigation for Patterson-UTI Management, where he won two major courtroom victories in 2022 — one against former employees who allegedly took the company’s confidential information and the other involving an insurance coverage dispute for several underlying worksite injuries.

Citing McNabb’s leadership in those cases, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook recognize him as a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department.

For Brookfield’s Fred Day, ‘No Fire Drills’ Just Multibillion Dollar Deals   

As a rookie deal lawyer, Fred Day’s first transaction in 2007 was valued at more than $1 billion. In the 15 years since, Day has handled dozens of M&A and capital markets transactions with combined price tags exceeding $100 billion. No year in his career, however, matches the magnitude of 2022.



As managing director at Brookfield Asset Management, Day led six major infrastructure deals last year with a combined dollar value of more than $55 billion, including a $30 billion “first-of-its-kind” JV with Intel Corp. for a semiconductor fabrication facility in Arizona. As a result, Day is a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department.

Vitol’s Averill Conn is at ‘the Intersection of Energy and New Technology’

Averill Conn has spent the past 29 months at Vitol, where she played a key role in the acquisition of three wind farms in Pennsylvania and another in Illinois, the establishment of Vitol’s solar and battery storage development platform, the negotiation of a long-term Renewable Energy Certificates purchase agreement with Meta Inc. in connection with a solar project in California, the negotiation of long-term virtual power and purchase agreements of utility-scale solar facilities in the Northeast involving AT&T and Vitol’s investment in FlexGen Power Systems, a software technology provider for energy storage solutions.

Citing Conn’s extraordinary success, the Houston Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook award the Vitol Associate GC with the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

When it Comes to Diversity & Inclusion, HPE ‘Just Gets It’

Over the last several years, general counsel Rishi Varma and associate general counsel Jude Andre have implemented a number of diversity initiatives at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, whose corporate legal department is known for its innovation, welcoming culture and commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the legal profession. The result has been a more engaged workforce around DEI issues and recognition by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook. They have named HPE — with Varma and Andre at the helm — as finalists for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion award.

Will Marsh: This Son-of-a-Son-of-a-Lawyer Deals in the Complex

On what he later described as his best day as GC of Cactus Inc., a Houston-based wellhead and pressure-control provider, Will Marsh brought in the $621 million acquisition of tubing manufacturer FlexSteel Technologies Holdings.

The transformational deal marked a pretty good day for Cactus, as well. And now Marsh, Cactus and Bracewell, their outside counsel, are finalists in the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Awards for M&A Transaction of the Year.

Eleox GC Becky Gottsegen Helps Energy Giants Work Toward a Common Goal

In the fall 2021, six large North American energy companies that vigorously compete against each other formed a joint venture that used real-time digital technology that would help them resolve certain operational inefficiencies in natural gas post-trade processing. But the new JV, Eleox, needed a GC. They chose Becky Gottsegen.



“One of my strengths is building. I like making things happen,” Gottsegen said. And that is an understatement. She has done everything during her first 16 months — negotiating contracts with business partners, handling antitrust concerns, ensuring cybersecurity and data protection, getting the six energy giants to agree on SaaS agreement terms, filing patent applications, helping pick brand colors and even “finding hip Heights office space.” Gottsegen is also a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department.

BMC Legal Team Needed ‘Sheer Tenacity, Strategy and Endurance’ to Win $1.6B Award

BMC Software GC Pat Tagtow and his senior counsel, Sarah Menendez, spent five years litigating and two weeks at trial claiming that competitor but sometimes business partner IBM made a “material misrepresentation” and acted in “bad faith” during contract negotiations when it agreed to not displace BMC’s products from AT&T’s mainframe systems but did so anyway. There were 52 depositions, 17 expert reports, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced as evidence and more than 950 court docket entries.

But last Memorial Day, Tagtow, Menendez and lead trial lawyer Sean Gorman spent all day checking phone messages and emails every 30 minutes and refreshing PACER to see if the judge had issued his verdict. A billion dollars was at stake. Finally, just as the Menendezes sat down to a dinner of buttermilk brined baked chicken, biscuits and slaw, the decision arrived. This is the story behind the three people who led the litigation and why it is a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.

Raymond Chang ‘Takes Extreme Ownership of Everything’ at DNOW

DistributionNOW GC Raymond Chang and his colleagues noticed a wave of sudden worker departures at its Odessa Pumps business. A speedy internal investigation was followed by a quick lawsuit in which the global supplier of oil and gas drilling equipment and parts accused an Odessa businessman and other former workers of stealing confidential information and trade secrets. The case went to trial five months later ending with a jury unanimously finding in DNOW’s favor and awarding $9 million in damages.



The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Chang as the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department. This is his story.

Q&A: Raymond Chang

For Premium Subscribers: When Raymond Chang noticed in the spring 2022 that a wave of key workers at DistributionNOW were leaving in a “coordinated mass exodus,” he felt the need to investigate. That investigation revealed that the employees, including a senior executive, were planning to create a competitive venture using stolen company property. The result was a lawsuit that resulted in a $9 million jury verdict. .

Lawbook founder Mark Curriden asked Chang, has been named 2022 ACC General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department, about his experience, what he looks for in outside counsel and his other successes at DistributionNOW.

Honeywell’s Dionne Hamilton: ‘’Pragmatic Leader with an Uncanny Ability to Demand Respect’

Honeywell Smart Energy GC Dionne Hamilton has scored several successes during her 30 months on the job, including leading the legal department’s role in the company’s launch of revolutionary gas meter technology that monitors residential and commercial activities in real time and stops incidents before they occur. She advises senior corporate leadership on all legal issues, new regulatory activities and geopolitical subjects that impact operations, works on M&A and joint ventures and manages all aspects of the legal budget. Hamilton is also national leader on DEI.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named the UT Law graduate a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

Bill Moss is Talos Energy’s ‘Quarterback’

For nearly all of 2022 and the first few months of 2023, Talos Energy GC Bill Moss guided the Houston company through the negotiations and highly complex $1.1 billion acquisition of EnVen, a fellow deep-water operator in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was a difficult deal to get done,” said Moss, who has corporate law in his DNA.


Citing the complexity of the deal, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named the Talos acquisition, led by Moss and Vinson & Elkins as outside counsel, as a finalist for the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year. This article looks at the Talos acquisition and the GC behind it.

2023 Houston Corp. Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement Goes to Sempra Infrastructure GC Carolyn Benton Aiman

Citing three decades of service to the Houston legal community, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announced Wednesday that Aiman will be the recipient of the 2023 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.

“I wanted to be a lawyer for as long as I can recall,” Aiman said in an interview. “From very early on I respected the importance of the rule of law and how it can make lives better. I understood that lawyers have influence and can bring change and can make things happen. I was, and I’m still, fascinated by how the law touches so much of our lives.”

Celanese GC Lynne Puckett Led DFW’s 2022 M&A Transaction of the Year

As a CIA intelligence officer focusing on Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lynne Puckett “got a ringside seat to the dissolution of Eastern Europe as communist-controlled in 1989. It was also when she realized she wanted to go to law school.

Three decades later, Puckett is the general counsel of Celanese Corporation, an Irving-based global chemical and specialty materials company with a market cap of $12 billion. In November 2022, Puckett and her legal team closed an $11 billion acquisition of a majority ownership in DuPont’s mobility and materials business.

Citing the deal’s extraordinary complexity, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named Puckett, her in-house legal team at Celanese and outside counsel at Baker Botts as the recipient of the 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year.

Erin McDowell: Range Resources New GC in ‘An Especially Dynamic Industry’

When Range Resources long-time GC David Poole retired 10 days ago, the board named his handpicked successor Erin McDowell to fill his role. In an exclusive interview with The Texas Lawbook, McDowell discusses the factors that impacted her career, the path she took to become a chief legal officer of a $6 billion natural gas company and the challenges she and Range face.

Range Resources GC David Poole Retires after 15 Years, Joins Wick Phillips

David Poole, who worked on an oil rig out of high school and rose to become the top legal officer at two major energy companies in Texas, retired as the GC of Range Resources Friday. In an interview with The Texas Lawbook on Sunday, Poole discusses his passion for oil and gas law, his challenges and successes as a GC for two decades, his best day on the job and his plans for the future at Wick Phillips.

15 GCs and Senior In-House Counsel Talk Diversity, Law Firms, Pipeline

The Texas Lawbook interviewed 15 corporate GCs and senior in-house counsel in Houston and the DFW area about the role of diversity in hiring outside counsel, specific steps law firm leaders can take to improve diversity and address the pipeline.

Corporate counsel at Keurig Dr Pepper, McAfee, Schlumberger, Noble Corp, HF Sinclair, Ocwen Financial, Tuesday Morning, Talen Energy, PepsiCo Foods, American Airlines, Shell USA, Phillips 66, MB2 Dental and BHP give their insight related to DEI issues.

Q&A with GM’s Juli Greenberg

General Motors lawyer Juli Greenberg’s tireless work in improving diversity in the legal profession recently landed her as the recipient of the 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion, presented by The Texas Lawbook and the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Dallas-Fort Worth chapter.

This article includes Greenberg’s comments on the current state of diversity while accepting her award and a Q&A covering challenges legal departments face regarding diversity, which diversity programs she finds effective and the significance of the pipeline.

TI’s Debbie Bartlett: A Lifetime of Achievements

Debbie Bartlett’s college psychological profile gave her two career options: Be a lawyer or a movie director. Texas Instruments has been the beneficiary of Bartlett deciding to go to law school. For the past 27 years, she led or played a critical role in 208 domestic and international transactions, including 54 acquisitions at TI with a combined deal value of more than $15 billion.

In January, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook honored Bartlett with the 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement. This is her story.

McAfee ‘Fortunate Beyond Words’ to Have Sarah Decker In-House

In the four years since Sarah Decker joined computer security giant McAfee, she has had a few items on her plate, including an $8.6 billion IPO amid the Covid pandemic, which meant doing all the legal work necessary for listing on the NASDAQ; a $4 billion sale of its enterprise business; a $450 million securities offering; and a $14 billion take-private transaction in 2022.

Citing numerous successes last year, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Decker as the 2022 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department (21 attorneys or more).

HF Sinclair’s Vaishali Bhatia Balances Concerns of Business and Law, and Wins a Green Apatosaurus

Vaishali Bhatia experienced five crazy months in 2022. As HollyFrontier’s GC, she and her team closed the $400 million acquisition of the Puget Sound Refinery, negotiated and closed the $2.7 billion acquisition of Sinclair Oil Corporation and Sinclair Transportation, which required multiple regulatory approvals and the creation of an entirely new publicly-traded entity. That was immediately followed by a $400 million senior notes offering and a new credit facility.

Citing those extraordinary successes, the ACC DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named Bhatia as the 2022 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department.

Keurig Dr Pepper, MB2 Dental, Black Mountain Sand, OpTic Gaming Winners at 2022 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announced the winners in four competitive categories – Business Litigation of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Senior Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department and General Counsel of the Year for a Solo Legal Department – and presented awards to in-house counsel in a dozen different categories.

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