For more than four years, Huntsman Corp. and its General Counsel David Stryker fought a high-stakes legal battle over an acquisition of a company whose technology ended up not working. Stryker and Huntsman hired the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to sue for fraud and breach of contract. In 2021, Huntsman and Kirkland won, securing an arbitration victory that led to a $665 million settlement. More recently, Huntsman and Stryker secured a $94 million jury verdict in New Orleans in a separate lawsuit. Stryker’s recent wins came in quick succession, but they were the product of the deep-seated instinct for advocacy that has coursed through Stryker’ veins since the day he became a trial lawyer. The 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year goes to Stryker and the lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis.
Phillips 66 Team Used 11 p.m. Nightly Calls and Creative Legal Work to Complete $3.4B Transaction
Each night at 11 p.m. for nearly a year, Robert Task, Julie Pradel and Maine Goodfellow were on the phone discussing the problems they faced, the challenges lying ahead and the successes achieved that day. The three senior-level in-house counsel at Phillips 66 spent hundreds and hundreds of hours negotiating the terms, handling due diligence, doing the paperwork and getting the necessary approvals to push Phillips 66’s $3.4 billion acquisition of its limited partner, Phillips 66 Partners, over the finish line. Task, Pradel and Goodfellow faced multiple headwinds: stresses from the lingering pandemic, fluctuating oil and gas prices, rising interest rates, a tumultuous global economic environment and wild swings in stock prices. But they got the deal done and it is a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Transaction of the Year.
Q&A: Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett
Premium-Only Content: Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett describes how her family history and Okinawan heritage give her strength.
Q&A: Rob Task, Julie Pradel and Maine Goodfellow
Premium-Only Content: The Phillips 66 trio share what they look for in hiring outside counsel and detail public service projects they are involved in.
Medical Informatics Associate GC Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett Helps ‘Save Lives Bit by Bit’
Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett was nine when her grandfather needed a heart transplant. She was there when doctors used an artificial heart machine to keep him alive while he waited his turn on the transplant list. “I couldn’t believe how this one piece of technology was not only keeping him alive, but vastly improved his quality of life,” she said. “All those experiences I lived through with him led me to end up where I am today, working for a healthcare-technology company that creates software to make the jobs of healthcare professionals more efficient and accurate, in order to save more lives.”
Twenty-five years later, Desgranges-Ellett is the associate general counsel and compliance officer at Medical Informatics Corp., a healthcare-technology company where she helped create and implement the company’s first contract-management system, led the company’s internal-ethics initiative and mentoring program and is designing the formal return-to-work policies and procedures. She is also a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.
Q&A: Kathleen Bertolatus
Premium-Only Content: Kathleen Bertolatus offers advice for outside counsel and shares why she believes pro bono work helps make lawyers better.
Phillips 66’s Kathleen Bertolatus: Pro Bono ‘Can Truly Change the Lives of Our Clients’
Seven weeks ago, a 15-year-old West African who had never been in an airplane before and who speaks very little English walked through the international arrival terminal at Bush International Airport with three bags containing everything he owned. The teen’s mother, her body stricken with cancer and worn from years of being beaten by male relatives in her homeland, raced to hug her son after nearly four years and 6,000 miles of separation.
The reunion was the result of four long years of legal work by Phillips 66 Senior Counsel Kathleen Bertolatus, who represented the mother in a series of immigration proceedings that resulted in the mother obtaining asylum and being reunited with her teenaged daughter after both faced forced female genital mutilation by their family and certain death if they didn’t comply. That was in 2019. On March 30 of this year, the great pro bono legal work of Bertolatus allowed mother, son and daughter to be together and to be safe.
Q&A: Cynthia Martinez
Premium-Only Content: Cynthia Martinez discusses the biggest challenges facing renewable energy today and identifies life and career mentors.
Total Energies’ Cynthia Redwine Martinez Has ‘Solar-Coaster Street Cred’ in Leading the Energy Transition
During the past two years, TotalEnergies assistant general counsel Cynthia Redwine Martinez has become one of the leading renewable energy law experts in the U.S. But it didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident. The path she took started a couple decades ago as the daughter of a glass-ceiling-smashing, highly respected Houston lawyer who became the first general counsel for Rice University. Fast-forward more than a decade later. Her reputation in the world of renewable and solar energy law is nearly unmatched. From the fourth quarter of 2019 to the end of 2021, Martinez has been a lead lawyer in nearly a dozen major clean energy acquisitions and joint ventures involving offshore wind operations and solar projects.
Q&A: Ashley Hill
Premium-Only Content: Ashley Hill reveals her pet peeves regrading outside counsel and makes a case for being hopeful about the future of diversity in the legal profession.
For BHP’s Ashley Hill, ‘DEI is Organic, Has Never Met a Stranger’
BHP asked its senior in-house counsel Ashley Hill to help lead the global energy and minerals giant’s efforts to diversify its ranks in two historically male-dominated industries: mining and oil and gas. The evidence five years later shows it could not have made a better selection. As BHP’s top employment lawyer in the Americas, Hill was part of a thorough review of the company’s recruiting, hiring, compensation and retention practices. She was instrumental in implementing a gender pay gap review that resulted in an increase in female salaries of more than $4 million.
Citing these significant successes, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Hill as one of the two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion.
Q&A: Diane Greene
Premium-Only Content: Diane Greene describes her most life impacting experience and identifies what she looks for in hiring outside counsel.
Diane Greene & GSFSGroup Legal Team: ‘No Stopping Until There’s a Solution’
Diane Greene and her legal team at GSFSGroup faced a monumental task: Develop and complete a transformational partnership agreement regarding vehicle product services that required the approval of 23 state regulatory authorities and 15 consumer finance lenders — all in less than three months. And that was before the other side’s GC left in the middle of the deal.
The agreement, the largest and most important in the history of GSFSGroup, added $165 million to its revenue stream and grew its product volume 28 percent. Greene and her team are finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Transaction of the Year.
Q&A: Bo Shi
Premium-Only Content: Bo Shi shares insights for outside counsel and empathizes with those 5 p.m. Friday requests.
Rookie Crescent Energy GC Bo Shi is ‘Premier Example of Immediate Value’
Bo Shi had a crazy 2021. He started the year as a lawyer at Vinson & Elkins representing trading platform TradeZero Holding in a $556 million SPAC merger. Independence Energy hired Shi as GC in October where he spent three intense months in the company’s $5.7 billion M&A deal with Contango Oil & Gas.
Nine weeks later, the transaction closed, a publicly traded company called Crescent Energy was created and Shi was named its GC. But there were no holiday breaks. Instead, he handled a $200 million securities offering and engineered an $815 million acquisition. The result: Shi is a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.
Q&A: Travis Torrence
Premium-Only Content: Travis Torrence discusses his career mentors, what he looks for in hiring outside counsel and how law firms can improve retaining diverse talent.
Shell’s Travis Torrence ‘Brings His Authentic Self to the Table’
Travis Torrence was in high school when his aunt, a school teacher-turned-political activist, sued her local government under the Voting Rights Act challenging the “at-large” election system. “She won,” Torrence said. “That was the first time I noticed the law being used to effectuate societal change — change that for that community was historic. I remember thinking that the law was the key to justice, fairness, equity and equality.”
Torrence, the great-great grandson of a slave who is now the leader of Shell USA’s global litigation bankruptcy and credit team, fearlessly tackles diversity, equity and inclusion. He is a pioneer on issues of the diversity pipeline and programs that support the LGBTQ community. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named Torrence as one of two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion.
Q&A: Dona Cornell
Premium-Only Content: Dona Cornell talks about her best day on the job and what she looks for in the next generation of lawyers.
University of Houston System GC Dona Cornell is a ‘Force and Trailblazer’
Dona Cornell took the GC job at the University of Houston System in 2002 because she thought it would be a slower pace. “I was so wrong,” Cornell said. “It is more like being in trial all the time.” Twenty years later, Cornell is still the chief legal officer for the university system, which has an annual budget of more than $1.8 billion, more than 10,000 employees and 77,000 students. She and her legal team confront groundbreaking issues, including the university’s invitation to join the Big 12 Conference, significant changes to higher education law including Title IX and how to handle classes during the pandemic.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook award the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Nonprofit/Public Institution to University of Houston System General Counsel Dona Hamilton Cornell.
Q&A: Andy Wright
Premium-Only Content: Andy Wright dishes on what he sees as the most important business issue facing corporate legal departments and what he looks for in hiring outside counsel.
Talen GC Andy Wright – ‘No Issue He Won’t Tackle’
No corporate general counsel in the history of the Texas power industry has been involved in more multibillion-dollar deals or guided companies through as many business-threatening crises as Andrew Wright. He played a lead role in 2007 when private equity bought energy giant TXU for $45 billion. He co-led Energy Future Holdings through the eighth largest bankruptcy in the U.S. and co-led the subsequent spin-offs of Vistra Energy and the $18.8 billion Oncor sale.
Wright is now the GC at Talen Energy, where he is once again handling groundbreaking deals, dealing with the litigation aftermath of Winter Storm Uri and helping navigate his company through significant energy market challenges. Wright is also the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award recipient for General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department.