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GCs/Corp. Legal Depts.

Honeywell, Phillips 66 Finalists for 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel M&A Transaction of the Year

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have selected Honeywell International and Phillips 66 as the finalists for the 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year. For 2023, a year that recorded some huge mergers and acquisitions, an independent panel of judges selected by The Lawbook and ACC Houston cited the extraordinary legal work of the in-house counsel and outside lawyers on Phillip 66’s $3.8 billion take-private transaction of DCP Midstream and Honeywell’s $670 million acquisition of Compressor Controls Corporation.

Mark Curriden

First Reserve, Forum Energy and SilverBow Finalists for 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Business Litigation of the Year

The general counsel at First Reserve, the GC at Forum Energy Technology and the associate GC at SilverBow Resources all scored big courtroom victories for their companies last year and have been selected by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook as finalists for the 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.

Mark Curriden

Jacobs Deputy GC Chasity Henry, ‘An Advocate for What’s Right and What’s Fair’

Chasity Henry says a "funny thing happened" on her way to becoming a litigation partner. She discovered that she "was much more interested in the inner workings of our clients’ businesses ... than I was about actually going to trial." Only 43, Henry has had an enormous impact on the Texas legal profession in strategic in-house positions with corporate giants Dr Pepper Snapple, Kimberly-Clark, CECO Environmental and now Jacobs, a Dallas-based multibillion-dollar international technical services company. She has led billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions and been one of the strongest and most effective advocates of diversity and inclusion in the DFW area.

Since joining Jacobs as deputy GC in March 2022, Henry transitioned two large internal contracting units within the company to her working group, which expanded her team from 20 to 60 lawyers, paralegals and professionals. She revised their operating model to meet the evolving needs of the business. She led the creation of a contracting process map, which enabled Jacobs to identify and implement procedural improvements and coordinate and delegate tasks more efficiently. In January, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook awarded Henry with the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

Mark Curriden

Match CLO Jared Sine ‘Taking on More of a Strategy Role’ at GoDaddy

For eight years, Jared Sine has navigated multibillion-dollar M&A deals and bet-the-company litigation at Match Group. On Friday, Sine announced that he is leaving the dating app tech company on March 11 to become the chief legal and chief strategy officer with GoDaddy, a $15 billion web hosting corporation, starting March 18. Sine's deputy at Match, associate general counsel Jeanette Teckman, will step in as acting chief legal officer.

“At the end of the day, eight years is a long time to be at any one place,” Sine told The Texas Lawbook in an interview Friday. “We’ve built a great team — a phenomenal team that I would be hesitant to challenge if I was an opponent. It’s been a fun ride to be part of the growth at Match.”

Mark Curriden

ACC-DFW and The Texas Lawbook Celebrate In-House Corporate Counsel Award Winners

Nearly 250 prominent general counsel, senior corporate counsel and partners at Texas law firms gathered Thursday night at the George W. Bush Institute to celebrate the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards, which recognizes extraordinary work and success of in-house counsel during the past year. Co-hosted by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook, 15 corporate in-house legal departments were honored and 12 were presented with awards. More than half of the finalists were women and more than one-fourth were ethnic minorities — all demonstrated incredible achievements during 2023. The DFW Corporate Counsel Awards is the signature event in the partnership between ACC-DFW and The Texas Lawbook. The two organizations also co-host CLEs throughout the year. Three of the dozen award categories were contested. In each of the three categories, all of the finalists were qualified to win. But, of course, only one could. This story includes the details and lots of photos from the event.

Mark Curriden

Rachel Morgan: Pro Bono ‘Should Be the Highest Priority Work that We Do’

She’s handled pro bono cases for the Dallas Volunteer Attorneys Program for 20 years. She sits on the board of a very large foundation. She’s led a series of successful fundraisers, her most recent a record-breaking $1.3 million. She’s helping kids afford college at her alma mater. She saved a rescue dog named Ricky Bobby who does not have chemical burns, but does have bad skin.

Oh yeah, and her day job is general counsel of the country’s largest television station owner. But Nexstar Media Group’s Rachel Morgan has traveled down a long path to get to where she is today, hustling every step of the way.

For all of her achievements, The Texas Lawbook and the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Dallas-Fort Worth chapter have named Morgan the recipient of the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Pro Bono and Public Service. Here is her full story.

Natalie Posgate

Pioneer’s Akshar Patel Counseling the Board on the Biggest M&A Deal of 2023

Akshar Patel has always been a prodigy, graduating summa cum laude at 19 and law school at 21, where he was an editor at SMU Dedman School of Law’s International Law Journal. He had four years of corporate law practice on his resume and was associate general counsel at Flowserve Corporation at 26. Now a ripe old 38, Patel is the corporate secretary and vice president of legal at Pioneer Natural Resources, where he played a critical role in the October 2023 $64.5 billion acquisition of Pioneer by Exxon Mobil.

“He played an instrumental role in orchestrating the largest deal signed in the entire world in 2023,” said Gibson Dunn partner Jeff Chapman. “To quote the great sage Adam Sandler, ‘Not too shabby.’"

Citing his extraordinary work on the Exxon Mobil deal, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Patel with the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Corporate Secretary/Legal Counselor of the Year.

Mark Curriden

Match Litigation Team Took on the 800-pound Gorilla and Won

When Google changed its policy in 2020 to require all businesses selling apps through the Google Play Store to use Google’s electronic bill pay system, officials at Match Group quickly realized that this meant hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. The alternative was even more devastating — being booted off Google Play, which generated billions in revenues from Android users for Match brands, such as Tinder, PlentyofFish and Match.com. The Match legal team — including Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine, Associate General Counsel Jeanette Teckman, Senior Litigation Counsel Stephen Myers and Litigation Counsel Katie Johnson — tried to work with Google on a resolution for two years, but finally decided in March 2022 to sue its largest business partner on allegations of market manipulation, broken promises and abuse of power.

The challenges for the Match legal group included Google’s extraordinarily positive public reputation and its army of successful lawyers, three million documents of discovery to review, an expedited trial plan set by the judge and co-plaintiffs combined into the litigation that did not always see eye-to-eye with Match on all issues. Winning at trial was anything but a sure thing. In fact, Apple had defeated a nearly identical lawsuit in 2021 and 2023. Efforts to reach an out-of-court agreement were fruitless.

Mark Curriden

GC Mark Robinson Navigated GameStop Through Memes, Short-squeezes, NFTs and Seven CEOs

When Mark Robinson joined GameStop in 2015, the Grapevine-based gaming retailer needed him to be an absolute generalist handling garden-variety contracts, basic commercial disputes and employment issues. All that changed in 2020 and has continued changing ever since.

There was the Covid pandemic in 2020, which exacerbated steep declines in retail brick-and-mortar operations. Then GameStop became the poster child for both short-squeezes and meme stocks, even as Robinson was promoted to GC. He navigated the company through complex regulatory issues related to the new NFT marketplace and digital assets business. He temporarily served as GameStop’s principal executive officer after the company’s board fired its CEO. And then there's the movie on GameStop starring Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Mark Curriden

Updated: Toyota’s Kelly Chen is a DEI ‘Doer’

When it comes to DEI, Kelly Chen of Toyota is a person whose actions match her words. She says hiring diverse outside legal teams is important; she gives legal work to diverse teams. She values mentoring young diverse attorneys and law students because she didn’t have anyone to ask questions (“whether they looked like me or not”) when she was starting her career. She says the legal industry is full of people with smarts, advocacy and creativity to figure out how to move the needle forward despite a challenging DEI climate. And she doubles down to do her part to lead programs and collaborate with outside counsel on solutions.

“When I think about what ‘commitment and service to diversity’ means, what comes to mind is a person who shows up, rolls their sleeves up — in ways both big and small, and works — over and over again — not for one time, one event, one year ... Kelly Chen comes to mind,” said Toyota's Mey Ly Ortiz.

The Texas Lawbook and Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW chapter have named Chen the recipient of the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion. This is her story.

(Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comments from a law student mentored by Chen).

Natalie Posgate

Envoy Air’s Chris Pappaioanou — ‘Doing the Right Thing’ and Getting Results

Chris Pappaioanou was a customer service agent with Great Lakes Airlines at Telluride’s airport in 2001 when he handed his résumé to Mesa Airlines CEO Jonathan Ornstein, who was boarding a plane. Weeks later, Pappaioanou was hired to be Mesa’s vice president of legal affairs. Two decades later, he is one of the most influential and respected lawyers and executives at Irving-based Envoy Air. During the past two years, Pappaioanou negotiated a transformative, industry leading collective bargaining agreement that reversed attrition within Envoy Air’s pilot ranks and attracted hundreds of new pilots to the airline. He also led several legal victories, including the resolution of a biometrics privacy suit in Illinois and a successful resolution to a wage and hour class action suit in California. And he was instrumental in the restructuring of Envoy Air’s human resources and legal departments to better align with the airline's current needs as it continues to experience growth. But it all points back to the cold Colorado day when Mesa's CEO saw something special in the guy loading his luggage.

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announce that Pappaioanou is one of two finalists for the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department, which is less than five attorneys. This is his story.

Mark Curriden

Ecobat’s Carolyn Lam — ‘Racing to the Next Mile Marker’

Growing up, Carolyn Lam had no interest in being a lawyer. Her parents, immigrants from Vietnam, were against her becoming an attorney. “They were extremely concerned about my decision to become a lawyer, and what they saw on TV wasn’t promising,” Lam said. “Who wants your kid to learn how to weasel their way out of the truth and subvert the law?”

Lam did fine. Better than fine, actually. She is now the deputy GC at Dallas-based Ecobat, the world’s largest battery recycler. And her successes during the past year and a half include settling a major class action lawsuit against Ecobat for pennies on the dollar, the divestiture of seven different business operations across three countries in southern Africa and the implementation of the company’s first global anticompetition training program and global code of conduct.

Mark Curriden

Maria Alonso: ‘Every Day Is My Best Day’ at Tokyo Electron

In October 2022, the U.S. government imposed novel and complex semiconductor export control rules designed to limit Chinese access to advanced integrated circuits for artificial intelligence and other technology innovations with potential military applications. The 139-pages issued by the U.S. Commerce Department forced semiconductor companies to interpret and immediately comply with the massive new regulatory regime. Tokyo Electron, an $84 billion Japanese-based global innovative semiconductor production equipment maker with significant U.S. operations, turned to a 32-year-old Dallas lawyer only four years out of law school for guidance. Maria G. Alonso did not disappoint.

“Maria immediately pulled up her sleeves and went to work, advising company executives in the U.S. and Japan on the nuances of the new rule and how it would impact the company in the U.S. as well as its operations abroad,” said Stinson international trade partner Elsa Manzanares. “There is no doubt Maria Alonso was the right person at the right time." Citing her success, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Alonso one of two finalists for the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.

Mark Curriden

City Electric Supply’s Clinton Willett is ‘Not Afraid to Get into the Weeds’

Clinton Willett was a teenager when his mother waged a mighty battle against cancer — a fight she heartbreakingly lost. “Being a lower-middle-class family, I saw the devastating financial implications of such a fight,” said Willett, noting that his father was a career U.S. Postal Service employee. “I knew I had to find a career that would allow me to provide a different lifestyle and comfort level for my family if I worked hard enough.”

Fifteen years later, Lynne Willett would be mighty proud of her son. Willett earned a bachelor’s degree from Dallas Baptist University, graduated cum laude from the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law and is now corporate counsel of City Electric Supply in Dallas. He has been so successful during his first two years at City Electric that the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Willett as one of two finalists for the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel of the Year Award for Rookie of the Year. This is his story.

Mark Curriden

For 25 Years, Diane Hornquist Has Been Hunt Realty’s Go-To Problem Solver

As nearly 300 Dallas leaders gathered at 2323 North Field Street just north of downtown on Oct. 10 for the official groundbreaking of Goldman Sachs’ new $500 million, 800,000 square-foot complex, Diane Hornquist sat on the front row just absorbing it all. Hornquist never took the stage but she was critical in the 11-acre North End mixed use development becoming a reality. “This deal involved a complicated build-to-suit lease, entitlement work, master development work, a joint venture, a mortgage loan and a mezzanine loan, and Diane led and was deeply involved in all aspects of it,” said Baker Botts partner Jeremy Gott. “I can easily say that without Diane’s leadership and tenacity, it would have been next to impossible to have successfully concluded this transaction in a timely manner — or perhaps at all.”

Mark Curriden

2023 DFW GCs of the Year: GameStop, Avantax and Hunt Realty

Corporate general counsel faced a year of business and governmental turmoil, higher interest rates, tightened capital markets and dramatic changes in state and federal regulatory schemes throughout 2023. But three GCs did it exceptionally well. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announced the 2023 DFW General Counsel of the Year awards Tuesday for three categories. The winners are GameStop General Counsel Mark Robinson, Hunt Realty Investments General Counsel Diane Hornquist, and former Avantax Chief Legal Officer Tabitha Bailey. A panel of independent judges reviewed more than 60 nominations in 13 different categories submitted by corporate legal departments and law firms. The DFW Corporate Counsel Awards recognize the successes and leadership demonstrated by in-house counsel in North Texas.

Mark Curriden

DFW Business Litigation and Rookie of the Year

The legal department at Match Group is the recipient of the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year. Clinton Willett, corporate counsel at City Electric Supply, and Maria Alonso, trade and corporate counsel at Tokyo Electron U.S. Holdings, are the two finalists for the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announced Monday.

Corporate legal departments and law firms submitted more than 60 nominations in 13 different categories for this year’s DFW Corporate Counsel Awards, which recognize the successes and leadership demonstrated by in-house counsel in North Texas. DFW General Counsel of the Year will be announced Tuesday.

Mark Curriden

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