Daria Russell has experienced a lot since she joined the legal team at Houston-based Mattress Firm in 2015 — more than a dozen M&A transactions, including a 2016 $3.8 billion merger, a crippling accounting scandal involving the company’s former corporate parent, a subsequent 2018 multibillion-dollar corporate bankruptcy and then a $5 billion merger with Tempur Sealy that closed earlier this year.
In May, Mattress Firm rewarded Russell for her decade of extraordinary legal work by promoting her to general counsel, overseeing five in-house lawyers, two health and safety professionals and seven loss-prevention contractors.
In an interview with The Texas Lawbook, Russell said taking over the top legal position has come with no real surprises.
“I think that is a testament to how long I have been at Mattress Firm as part of the management team,” she said. “I am more of a people-manager and thought partner now — in addition to doing the day-to-day work of the legal department. I also am spending more time thinking about the development of the department as a whole and how my team can be better prepared to address enterprise risk.”
Russell said the biggest, most immediate challenge has been “transitioning from primarily a working to a managing attorney with limited bandwidth.”
“I like to work on things from start to finish, and having to remember to delegate — even if that requires sending work to outside counsel — has been a change in mindset,” she said. “It’s not every day that a department has a change in leadership, and so I am also taking this as an opportunity to rethink how we work as a team, how work gets done and by whom, and what we can do to be more effective and efficient overall.”
Russell said she, like most corporate chief legal officers, is dealing with issues ranging from artificial intelligence and intellectual property rights and data privacy issues to ESG compliance and everything digital.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Russell with the 2020 Houston Corporate Counsel’s Senior Counsel of the Year award for a Small Legal Department.
Russell was born in Somerville, New Jersey, but grew up in Houston’s suburbs.
“I had a great childhood. My parents had difficult situations while growing up, for different reasons, and as a result I think they made the conscious decision that my brother and I would always have better,” she said.
Russell’s father grew up in a trailer on a farm where his parents were sharecroppers. He worked in the natural gas and energy industry for over 45 years and retired from Sequent Energy in 2020. Her mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service for more than 30 years.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and economics from Southwestern University in 2002, Russell planned to work at the thriving Houston energy corporation Dynegy, where she had interned throughout college. But during her senior year, Enron collapsed, and her job prospects with it. Dynegy attempted to acquire Enron but found itself facing scrutiny involving accounting issues.
“The Houston job market was in shambles,” Russell told The Lawbook in 2020. “My parents are old school, so I knew I couldn’t live at their house — [being] grown, college educated — and not have a job, so I decided to continue my education and apply to law school.”
“I only applied to Harvard after being pushed to do so, repeatedly, by my mother,” she said. “She had saved a letter from the school inviting me to apply. So on a whim, I completed the application and found out that I was accepted.”
Russell graduated from Harvard in 2006 and started work at Fulbright & Jaworski — now Norton Rose Fulbright — that fall in its corporate securities and transactions practice.
Toyota Managing Counsel Derek Lipscombe, who happens to be Russell’s uncle, said that while his niece may have been born in New Jersey, she “got to Texas as quick as she could as a toddler.”
“Daria has never forgotten where she came from and who worked long and hard to get her there,” Lipscombe said. “Daria is an outstanding attorney, a wonderful mother to her young daughter Camille, an awesome daughter and wonderful niece.”
Russell said she has “historically shied away from relying too much on outside counsel” and still does not use law firm attorneys to handle commercial contracts.
“But, as my practice has matured, and I have had to transition from a working attorney to more of thought partner [and] trusted advisor, I have had to rely more on outside counsel,” she said. “I try to use outside counsel in a way that makes sense and that is efficient.”
“We use outside counsel for those areas where we truly lack expertise, [such as] tax or that can be handled by outside counsel with nearly exclusively like research, statute-driven practice [and] entity management,” she said. “I also find that I am transitioning our outside counsel to more junior lawyers on my team. So, I will make an introduction and provide background/historical context, but my role is limited to issues that require escalation or receiving updates.”
Russell said she wants advice from outside “that is practical and business-solution oriented.”
“We can pull the statute, read the court order, etc.,” she said. “We are looking for nuance: How have you seen this applied in practice, what are other clients doing to manage a particular risk, what am I not thinking about?”