© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(March 8) – Bracewell announced Thursday that Nancy LeGros has joined the firm’s Dallas office as a partner after six years as a leader in CHRISTUS Health’s legal department.
After realizing that solving “thorny legal problems” was her favorite thing, LeGros decided it was time to return to private practice.
“Building a legal team at an organization with an inspiring mission and an ambitious business plan was very rewarding,” LeGros said. “However, like many CLOs, I could not devote much time to substantive legal work.”
LeGros said she was “drawn to Bracewell because of the firm’s deep Texas roots and its entrepreneurial spirit.” She added that there was an opportunity to fill a need for the firm in regulatory compliance and operations.
After receiving her law degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 1993, LeGros began her career at Vinson & Elkins, where she eventually made partner. She later moved to King & Spalding before landing at CHRISTUS in 2012 as general counsel.
CHRISTUS – an international Catholic health system with more than $5 billion in assets and operations in Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas, Mexico, Chile and Colombia – named LeGros its chief legal officer in 2016.
LeGros led a legal department that advised on strategic transactions in the United States and Latin America; conducted regulatory investigations; advised on establishment of Medicare Advantage and Healthcare Exchange plans; implemented a physician contract management system; assumed management of all claims and litigation; and advised senior leadership and multiple boards of directors on compliance and governance matters.
“Nancy’s experience, both in-house and in private practice, gives her unsurpassed knowledge of the complex issues facing the healthcare industry today,” Gregory Bopp, Bracewell’s managing partner, said in a statement.
As an attorney at a law firm, LeGros said she had “not fully comprehended the pace of in-house life” before her tenure at CHRISTUS.
“These days, health care providers have to move at the speed of light in order to take advantage of business opportunities that may not be available next week or even tomorrow,” she said. “I learned that legal advice is useless if it is not timely, and that there is no need to convey every nuance of the controlling legal authority.
“I needed plain-English explanations of the applicable legal requirements, and, most important of all, compliant options that we could move forward with.”
CHRISTUS’ new general counsel is Jeannie Frey, who previously served as GC at Presence Health, a Catholic health system in Illinois that is now part of AMITA Health, a joint venture of Ascension’s Alexian Brothers Health System and Adventist Midwest Health.
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