Dawud Crooms at 7-Eleven’s headquarters
Dawud Crooms, an in-house lawyer who led Dallas retail giant 7-Eleven through 15 acquisitions with a combined deal value of more than $30 billion during the past seven years, is the new general counsel at Atlantic Aviation, a private airline support-services operation.
Crooms, in an interview with The Texas Lawbook, said he “grew from an M&A specialist at 7-Eleven to more of a generalist” with experience leading integration of newly acquired businesses, as well as regulatory and procurement matters.
“I consider myself a builder because I love to grow and build things,” he said. “The leadership at Atlantic is a veteran group in the industry looking to do innovative things and grow. I get to help build a platform for the company to experience significant growth.”
Private equity giant KKR acquired Plano-based Atlantic Aviation in 2021 for $4.5 billion. Atlantic provides ground fueling, de-icing and other ground services to corporate and private airplane owners.
During his seven years at 7-Eleven, Crooms played a leading role in the convenience store chain’s 2018 purchase of Sunoco for $3.3 billion.
In 2020, Crooms led 7-Eleven’s $21 billion acquisition of Speedway.
“From soup to nuts, I was involved, and [the Speedway] transaction was fundamentally different from anything else I have handled from a size standpoint,” Crooms told The Texas Lawbook in 2021. “The level of diligence and integration planning was magnitudes larger.”
For his role in the transaction, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named Crooms a finalist for the 2020 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Deal of the Year. Later that year, the Texas General Counsel Forum also recognized Crooms for the deal.
Crooms also handled more than a dozen other transactions for 7-Eleven.
“The smaller, strategic transactions done for the technology or other purposes don’t get the big press releases, but $15 million to $20 million deals can be more complicated and more difficult to get over the finishing line than the billion-dollar-plus deals,” he said,
“Dawud is one of the best kept secrets in corporate law in Texas,” said Kirkland & Ellis partner Taj Clayton, who nominated Crooms for the DFW Corporate Counsel Award. “We don’t see a lot of African Americans leading multibillion-dollar transactions. Dawud is a decisive and pragmatic thinker and has an excellent business mind.”
Kirkland serves as one of the lead outside counsel for KKR and recommended Crooms for the Atlantic position.
Akin Gump partner Tom Yang, who was lead outside counsel on the 7-Eleven-Speedway deal, said the $21 billion transaction had many complexities to solve and hurdles to overcome ― not to mention the pandemic that ended face-to-face negotiations ― but Crooms never lost focus of the client’s objectives.
“The sheer volume of the responsibility on Dawud was enormous,” Yang said. “There were lots of ups and downs, but Dawud always kept things moving forward. He is excellent at cracking jokes to defuse intense situations at exactly the perfect moment.”
Crooms was born and reared in New Jersey. His father, who was a history professor at a community college in North Jersey, died when Dawud was three. His mother was the first in her family to go to college. She majored in communications at Seton Hall University and dreamed about a career as a radio broadcaster.
“My mother was my rock and foundation,” he said. “After my father passed away, she left her pursuit and began working at our church as an administrative assistant to the pastor. She ultimately found her passion educating children and spent her career running the church’s day care.”
Crooms received scholarships from NASA and UNCF to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta to study liberal arts with the goal of becoming a software engineer.
“These scholarships were critical as I wouldn’t have been able to attend Morehouse without them, and they allowed me to fully immerse myself in my college experience without the stress of financing my education or living expenses,” he said.
Crooms became student body president. He worked closely with the Morehouse Business Association, which introduced him to the world of finance. As a result, he added economics as a minor.
JPMorgan Chase hired Crooms in 2004 in its investment banking-operations division. The first year, he worked in software development and wrote code for the bank’s rapid development team that worked directly with the derivatives risk management team and built risk management modules and analyses within a proprietary system developed by JPMorgan.
Crooms quickly learned he liked the business side better. He worked two years as an analyst and then as an associate leading a small team analyzing risk for the derivatives trading desk.
Thoughts of law school never entered his mind until 2006. He was a newlywed and a father-to-be.
“My wife Kathrine did not share my love for the New York metro area as a mother-to-be, and there were limited options in derivatives trading or risk management outside of major financial centers,” he said. “Katherine recommended that I consider a career in law as an alternative. Her mother is an attorney and spent her career working for legal aid in metro-Detroit. She was exposed to a number of attorneys throughout her life and thought that I would enjoy a career in law.”
Crooms was a first-year student at the University of Michigan Law School when he got a call from then-Haynes and Boone partner Tom Yang, who invited Crooms to Dallas for a one-week, end-of-summer program.
Crooms joined Haynes and Boone in 2010, working on M&A activity and corporate securities.
“The partners at Haynes and Boone took a personal interest in me, my family and my development,” he said. “I believed that they saw something in me and were committed to ensuring that I had access to the opportunities I needed to succeed.”
Haynes and Boone and Crooms represented 7-Eleven in a handful of matters and had worked with David Colletti, a former Haynes and Boone lawyer who joined the in-house legal department at 7-Eleven in 2012.
The pair were playing basketball at a Dallas Young Lawyers Association event when Colletti, who is now vice president of M&A at 7-Eleven, told Crooms about an opening in their legal department.
Crooms said he was in his sixth year of practice at Haynes and Boone and had no interest in leaving, but that the 7-Eleven position “provided a good blend of sophisticated work and an ability to have a more balanced family life.”
Dawud brings deep experience with the legal issues and transactions that will help support Atlantic in the next steps of our journey and is a very good fit with our culture,” said Atlantic CEO Louis Pepper. “As we continue to grow, expanding the resources and capabilities of our legal and other management functions is critically important.”