Premium Subscriber Q&A: Shamoil Shipchandler
In this Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, Shamoil Shipchandler discusses the traits he seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with him and more.
Schwab Chief Counsel Shamoil Shipchandler ‘Wouldn’t Trade Places with Anyone’
Shamoil Shipchandler scored landmark successes as a high-profile white-collar Texas prosecutor and the SEC’s top corporate cop pursuing financial criminals such as self-proclaimed frack master Christopher Faulkner and top executives at AriseBank. Shipchandler is still racking up major achievements as chief counsel at Charles Schwab where he leads a team of 15 lawyers and 11 other legal professionals.
“Most of the successes of my group cannot be publicly celebrated because they are confidential,” Shipchandler told The Texas Lawbook. “For example, closing nonpublic regulatory investigations or securing millions of dollars in FINRA arbitration victories.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook have named Shipchandler and his team at Schwab as a finalist for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for DFW Corporate Legal Department of the Year.
Adapt or Be Replaced — The Future of In‑House Law in the Age of AI
When AI is embedded into daily workflows, processes such as contract review, compliance monitoring, risk analysis and knowledge management stop being bottlenecks and become sources of strategic leverage. That shift frees our teams to spend time where human judgment matters most. This article offers a practical roadmap for GCs: how to adopt AI safely, how to train people effectively and how to redesign processes with AI at the core — so the legal team can be a force multiplier for the business, not a brake.
CSW Industrials GC Luke Alverson: ‘A Business Leader that Brings Legal Skills to the Table’
Luke Alverson was a second-year associate at a large corporate firm with a nine-month-old daughter when his 23-year-old brother died in a car accident. “It hit me very hard. Losing Lance didn’t change my world view or values, but it certainly brought them into sharp focus," Alverson told The Texas Lawbook. “It was my ‘What do I want to be in my obituary?’ moment."
Alverson reevaluated his career and is now the GC at CSW, where he has worked on 17 M&A transactions during the past decade valued at more than $1 billion, including the October 2025 acquisition of heating and air-conditioning parts supplier Motors & Armatures Parts for $650 million. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook named Alverson as one of three finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Luke Alverson
In this Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, Luke Alverson discusses the traits he seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with him and more.
Stephen Myers Leads Match Group in String of High-Stakes Wins
Last December, Match Group's Stephen Myers and his legal team convinced a federal judge to rule that a class action lawsuit accusing Match's Tinder app of being intentionally addictive and seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages needed to be handled by arbitration rather than a jury trial. None of the plaintiffs, however, pursued the dispute in arbitration. Match promoted Myers to associate GC and he responded with a handful of extraordinary successes in 2025, including obtaining a highly favorable settlement in a deceptive advertising practices case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and convincing a federal judge in Delaware to grant Match’s summary judgment motion in a long-running patent infringement case.
The ACC’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Myers a finalist for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
DFW Celebrates Two Legal In-house Rookies and a Lifetime Achiever
Elaine Rodriguez has been a corporate general counsel, including the past 14 years at DFW Airport, longer than Cameasha Turner and Nur Kara have been alive, but all three are being honored by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook are pleased to announce that Rodriguez is being recognized with the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement. Past DFW Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include Gary Kennedy of American Airlines, Leanne Oliver of PepsiCo, Chris Luna of T-Mobile, Derek Lipscombe of Toyota and Marita Covarrubias of Tenet Healthcare.
Turner, who is corporate counsel at Brinker International, and Kara, who is the legal director for marketing and advertising at PepsiCo North America, are the finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.
2025 DFW Award Finalists: Senior In-house Counsel at Match, Michaels, Children’s Health, Dropbox and Caris Life Sciences
Six lawyers at North Texas companies have been named finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards for Senior Counsel of the Year. During the past week, ACC-DFW and The Texas Lawbook have announced the finalists for Business Litigation of the Year, M&A Transaction of the Year, General Counsel of the Year and Corporate Legal Department of the Year. The finalists for Rookie of the Year, Lifetime Achievement, Achievement in Pro Bono and Public Service and Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion will be announced later this week. The Lawbook has all the details.
Holland & Knight Recruits Texas A&M GC Ray Bonilla
As the general counsel and chief legal officer of the Texas A&M University System, Bonilla oversaw legal matters for eleven universities. He will focus his practice on representing educational institutions.
Texas GC Forum Awards 20th Annual Magna Stella Honors
The Texas General Counsel Forum recently honored 10 chief legal officers and senior in-house counsel with the 20th annual Magna Stella Awards, which recognizes success and leadership.
The awards ceremony, held Nov. 20 at the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort in San Antonio, unveiled the lifetime achievement award in honor of GC Forum CEO Lynn Bozalis, a beloved leader in the Texas corporate law community.
Brink’s Adds Maria Fernandez as Associate General Counsel
Brink’s Chief Legal Officer Kristen Cook announced the news on LinkedIn on Monday. “Maria brings a wealth of expertise in corporate governance, M&A, finance, and securities that will be invaluable as we continue to strengthen our legal and compliance functions globally," she said.
Samsung Recruits Dallas Litigation Partner Paulette Miniter In-House
Miniter joins Samsung Electronics America as director and senior counsel of litigation and government investigations from Dallas-based law firm Brown Fox.
San Antonio Celebrates General Counsel Successes
There were standing ovations and dancing celebrations, boisterous cheers and even many tears at the inaugural 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Awards on Thursday. The stories of extraordinary business and legal successes achieved by in-house corporate lawyers at San Antonio’s most prominent businesses — Whataburger, Valero, USAA, BioBridge Global, UT San Antonio, Zachry Group, VisionWorks, Howard Energy and OCI — were toasted and memorialized. The Texas Lawbook has photos from the awards event.
OCI’s Janet Jamieson is Navigating Sweeping Legal and Commercial Changes in Renewable Energy
As the world exited the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, Janet Jamieson and her husband “were ready for an adventure.” Jamieson had been a GC and senior counsel at three conventional-fired power plants over two decades. Then, she received a call from a legal recruiter with an opportunity at OCI Enterprise. OCI's emphasis on renewable energy and related manufacturing attracted Jamieson right away.
Two years into her job at OCI, the new administration and Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which introduced sweeping changes that directly affected OCI’s businesses. These changes came at a time when energy companies were already contending with global trade restrictions and supply chain pressures.
Lawyers that have worked with Jamieson say she has not only ably navigated these challenges, but she has enabled OCI to position itself as a leader in clean energy. For her contributions, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are honoring Jamieson with the 2025 General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department Award.
Zachry Legal Team ‘Gets to Yes Without Compromising Legal Integrity’
San Antonio trial lawyer Jay Old scored major courtroom successes in his 38-year career but the biggest hits have come in 2024 and 2025 when he and his legal team helped guide Zachry through a turbulent period of extraordinary challenge, including leading the energy services company to a transformational corporate restructuring. In addition, Old and his team of six attorneys and 17 other professionals this year negotiated an historic engineering, procurement and construction contract with Duke Energy for a natural gas power plant in North Carolina and separately signed a memorandum of understanding with Hyundai Engineering and Construction that created a partnership focused on nuclear power construction.
Citing the Zachry legal team’s achievements in 2024 and 2025, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are awarding the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for Corporate Legal Department of the Year.
VSP Visions’ Two Lisas and Their Historic Constitutional Fifth Circuit Win
Lisa Fields and Lisa Hill, top corporate counsel at VSP Vision, faced a critical legal and business decision in 2023 that would have a monumental impact on the future of their companies. A new Texas law posed an existential threat to their business. Fields and Hill recognized that suing the state of Texas to block the law would be extremely expensive. "We knew we had to take a direct attack, and we knew it would be a bold move to sue the state. And we knew we had to make a statement that we would not have our constitutional rights trampled,” Fields told The Texas Lawbook.
On May 23, Hill and Fields received an email at 10:43 a.m. from Dykema partner Christopher Kratovil. The subject line: “Good news from New Orleans.” A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit had unanimously awarded Visionworks a complete victory. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are honoring Fields, Hill and the litigation team at Dykema with the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.
UT San Antonio CLO Hailey Mullican Led ‘Historic Merger with Transformative Impact’
In September, the University of Texas San Antonio completed a merger with UT Health that legal experts agree was one of the most unique and complex deals of 2025 and will create the third-largest public research university in Texas and is expected to generate $7 billion in economic impact for San Antonio. “The merger is probably the most important decision the board of regents have made in the last 50 years,” UTSA CLO Hailey Mullican told The Texas Lawbook, pointing out that the deal was handled completely in-house. “Pretty quickly, the team realized that no one really knew how to do this. And I mean no one."
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are awarding the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year to Mullican and her legal team at UT San Antonio.
Valero GC Rich Walsh Fought the EPA and Won at the U.S. Supreme Court
Valero Energy GC Rich Walsh watched in astonishment in 2022 and 2023 as major petroleum-related companies were silent as the EPA allowed California to set more stringent fuel admission standards than required by federal law, creating an existential threat to their businesses. The California rules would force consumers to purchase vehicles that run on electricity instead of liquid fuels. Walsh led the charge to file lawsuits challenging these regulations. On June 20, Walsh’s efforts paid off when the U.S. Supreme Court handed Valero a sweeping victory.
“Sometimes it is very evident when we are very right, and I knew from the start that this was one of those times,” said Walsh, who is the recipient of the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
‘What-a-Lawyer’ — Meet the Fast-Food Chain’s CLO Elena Kraus
“I have witnessed Elena transform not just our legal department but also how the company operates in many positive ways, with an emphasis on legal and business ethics at all times,” said Whataburger VP of legal affairs Jeff Hagelman. "From Day One, Elena emphasized the ethical and respectful treatment of others, not just within the company but also with those outside the company, including adverse counsel and business competitors. From a legal community perspective, Elena has pushed each of us in the Whataburger legal department to take active roles in the communities we serve, including our home city of San Antonio. Elena is more than just a lawyer — she is helping run and lead the company."
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Whataburger Chief Legal Officer Elena Kraus with the 2025 C. Lee Cusenbary Ethical Life and Leadership Award.
Updated — BioBridge GC Richey Wyatt Used Problem-Solving Skills to Bring Students Back to Class
BioBridge Global GC Richey Wyatt was walking into his gym in June 2020 when he received a text message from San Antonio entrepreneur Graham Weston, who was seeking solutions to help get the city's children back to in-person learning. Minutes later, the two men were on the phone. The result was the creation of Community Labs and Bridge converting its blood testing laboratories to accommodate rapid Covid-19 testing of thousands of San Antonio school children, teachers and staff.
“We went from zero to 180 miles per hour really frickin’ fast,” Wyatt told The Texas Lawbook. “It was a wild ride that we knew would have a big impact on our community."
Citing his extraordinary legal and community achievements, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are honoring Wyatt with the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement. Wyatt and 11 other San Antonio corporate general counsel will be recognized on Nov. 6 at the inaugural San Antonio Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony.