Chasity Henry has been involved in several large corporate transactions recently, including Dr Pepper Snapple Group’s $1.7 billion cash acquisition of Bai Brands in January 2017 and Kimberly-Clark’s sale in December of its industrial welding and personal protective equipment businesses to Vancouver-based SureWerx.
Despite having no lawyers in her family, Henry has the pedigree of a multigenerational lawyer. She is a 2006 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law who became a corporate transactional lawyer at Vinson & Elkins and was mentored by prominent dealmaker Jeff Chapman. She has been a senior lawyer at three major businesses: Irving-based Vizient (formerly Novation), Dr Pepper Snapple (now Keurig Dr Pepper), and now assistant general counsel at Kimberly-Clark.
But perhaps Henry’s biggest project and most important success is one that she started with little fanfare and has received very little attention.
In October 2014, she invited a group of African-American women – most of them graduates of UT Law – to a program at V&E to discuss their experiences with diversity and inclusion.
“The C-suite executives are still mostly male,” she says. “After a series of lunches and happy hours, we decided we needed to get serious and start our own effort to help each other through mentoring, recommending each other for jobs and giving business to each other. We realized that we are in a position to address the pipeline, because the present lack of diversity in the legal profession will continue if we don’t.”
With Henry as its founder, The NEW Roundtable – a non-profit which draws half its members from the corporate in-house world – was born.
“There were 25 of us there at the start,” she says. “Now, we have about 80 members. We thought it might be years before we started seeing results, but we already have witnessed several successes. Several of our members have gotten work, been promoted to partner and been appointed to seats on boards.”
The Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to announce that Henry is a finalist for the 2018 Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Diversity of the Year Award. The finalists will be recognized and the winners announced at the annual Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards event at the Bush Institute on Thursday, Jan. 24.
“It is remarkable how well Chasity does in every aspect of her life,” says Chapman, who is now a partner at Gibson Dunn. “Excellent lawyer? Check. Devoted mother? Check. Loyal political spouse? Check. And always with a seriousness of purpose, combined with great poise and kindness, that made her a joy to mentor and makes her an honor to represent.
“I’m not sure how she does it all,” Chapman says.
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Henry says she wanted to be either a lawyer or doctor at a very early age. Her father is an air traffic controller, and her mother worked for the federal government. She has a sister who is a surgeon and a brother who is an NYU-educated actor.
“I grew up in an incredibly loving and caring environment,” she says. “We all followed our dreams, which is a testament to our parents and that they required us to take education seriously.
“Even as a little girl, I was in tune with fairness and justice,” she says. “I saw disparities and thought lawyers were the people who could do something about it.”
Henry was the first in her immediate family to graduate from college and the first to be a lawyer.
“Corporate law was the last thing on my mind, as I always thought I would be a trial lawyer,” she says.
Henry credits V&E for training her to be a good M&A lawyer, while the jobs at Vizient, Dr Pepper and Kimberly-Clark took her career to the next level.
Creating the NEW Roundtable was significant, but she didn’t stop there. In the summer of 2018, Henry helped launch DAPP Direct. DAPP stands for Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program.
2018 DAPP Direct Scholars
“Diversity numbers have declined during the past decade because we continue to do the same things that haven’t worked and we keep doubling down on those same tactics,” she says. “New ideas need to be tried. Law firms need to expand the number of law schools from which they recruit, and they need to recruit a little deeper into the class, instead of just stopping at the top 10 percent.”
Henry says there are positive signs. Thirty law firms – about half of them in Texas – have joined DAPP Direct.
“The overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic response to DAPP Direct, particularly in Dallas, denotes a desire by law firms and companies to increase the diversity of their firms and legal departments and a willingness to partner with others in the legal community in that endeavor,” she says.
Henry says several of the law firms have signed up to sponsor a student during the summer of 2019 and others have made additional contributions to sponsor the upcoming DAPP Direct Job Fair to be held in Dallas on Jan. 25.
Colleagues and friends say Henry’s success is the result of two factors: passion for justice and equality and her intellectual ability to identify problems and seek solutions.
“The kind of courage that Chasity has shown to take on these issues directly is something to be admired,” says Husch Blackwell partner Chalon Clark. “Chasity is very calculated about her strategy in reaching her goals.”
While Henry says the NEW Roundtable is the result of many people coming together, others say she is the singular factor for its success.
“There is no doubt that it is Chasity driving this – she is pretty spectacular,” says Clark Hill Strasburger attorney Sarah Wariner. “Chasity puts in the work to make this happen. Others complain about the problem. Chasity gets results.”