Yvette Ostolaza
For the first time in history, a Texan is set next year to become the top managing lawyer of a 2,000-attorney global law firm based outside of the Lone Star State.
And she’s a woman. And Hispanic.
Chicago-founded Sidley Austin informed its lawyers and staff in 20 cities worldwide over the weekend that prominent Dallas trial lawyer Yvette Ostolaza, a three-decade veteran of the Texas business law community, will become chair of the firm’s managing committee in 2022.
Ostolaza, who was born in Miami to parents who sought asylum from communist Cuba in the early 1960s, will be the first Latina to lead a top 50 revenue-generating corporate law firm in the U.S. She will be only the second Hispanic to head a top 100 U.S. firm. The other is Wally Martinez, managing partner of Hunton Andrews Kurth, who is also the son of Cuban immigrants.
Ostolaza, who almost didn’t even go to college and who was told by family that she was “crazy” for even thinking about going to law school, takes the helm of Sidley at a time when it is experiencing tremendous growth and success globally and in Texas. The firm achieved $2.46 billion in revenue in 2020, including $187 million from its Texas operations and the 150 attorneys that practice in Dallas and Houston.
Legal industry analysts say Ostolaza has demonstrated exceptional critical thinking and boundless energy during her three-decade long career and she has played an instrumental role in Sidley’s success in Texas.
“Yvette is the great American success story,” said Kent Zimmermann, a law firm consultant with the Zeughauser Group. “Yvette is a skilled litigator and leader and she is a highly effective recruiter who will raise the profile of the firm.
“But this decision by Sidley also speaks to the importance of the Texas economy to the legal profession going forward,” Zimmermann said. “She will not be the last Texan to be named to head a global law firm.”
Ostolaza, in an exclusive interview with The Texas Lawbook on Saturday, said she is incredibly honored that the partners at Sidley chose her to be the firm’s leader next April.
“Growing up in a middle-class Cuban neighborhood in Miami, I would never have imagined this could even happen,” she said. “We are the sixth largest law firm in the world by revenue thanks to the great leadership we have. This is truly a dream come true.”
Larry Barden
In announcing the decision, Sidley’s current management committee chair Larry Barden said Ostolaza will be the first person to chair the leadership team in the firm’s 155-year history to office outside of Chicago. He said she is “natural” for the role and said she is a “highly dynamic and effective leader.”
“Certainly, Dallas has been a highly successful office and it continues to grow,” Barden told The Texas Lawbook. “But the election of Yvette to the chair-elect role is not driven by our future growth plans for Dallas, which are significant, but by our plans for the firm. Yvette is a highly talented leader who already is managing on a firmwide basis and with a global perspective.”
Ostolaza, 56, has served as co-chair of Sidley’s global litigation practice, which has more than 800 lawyers. She said that she plans to “maintain my full practice” of litigation and internal corporate investigations, but that she also plans to spend the next year working with Barden, whom she calls a mentor, and traveling to each of Sidley’s offices.
“It is important for leaders to stay in contact with clients,” she said. “I plan to spend time in each office talking with our lawyers about the challenges ahead, but I plan to stay in Dallas. Not moving.”
Sidley partner Angela Zambrano, who has worked with Ostolaza at Weil and Sidley, said Ostolaza’s “positive take on the world is her secret weapon.”
“Yvette has an amazing talent to see into the future,” Zambrano said. “She sees firm leaders in junior associates, office administrators in legal assistants, and future general counsel in summer associates. Then she takes that vision and does everything she possibly can to give the person the opportunity to achieve that goal.
“She sees trends around corners, exudes energy and forward motion in a shifting marketplace, looks for the positives in everything, and is singularly dedicated to ‘her people,’ meaning her clients and her colleagues across the firm,” she said.
EnLink Midstream Chief Legal Officer Alaina Brooks said Ostolaza goes out of her way to support her law firm colleagues and corporate clients.
Yvette and Sidley’s Pro Bono “All Stars” — winners of 2018 Gold Award from Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program
“Some lawyers become more of relationship builders as they progress in their career,” Brooks said. “Yvette definitely has that skill, but she also remains a tireless advocate and innovative legal thinker. She is a tremendous lawyer. I trust her counsel without question.”
Ostolaza’s parents, who now live in Dallas, fled Cuba in 1960 and settled in Miami. They started a handful of businesses ranging from painting houses, putting up fences, carpet cleaning and even a printing company.
“As a young child, I learned to answer the phone like I was part of the business,” Ostolaza said. “I put on a deep voice, ‘Hello, you are calling Sunshine Carpets.’
“My grandmother sold Avon, and so I took Avon catalogues with me to middle school to try to sell to my teachers and fellow students,” she said. “The attitude in the Cuban community was, How soon can you get a paying job that helps out your family.”
During high school, Ostolaza worked at Sears, as a teacher’s aide and other odd jobs.
Thinking she should work in her parents’ business, Ostolaza almost didn’t go to college. But a high school calculus teacher intervened and told her she “would be crazy to not go to college.”
Thankfully, the folks giving SAT exams allowed Ostolaza to take the college entrance tests as a walk-in. She aced it. She applied at the last minute to the University of Miami. The college not only accepted her, but it gave her a full academic scholarship.
Ostolaza, despite working nearly full-time, whizzed through college in three years.
Eastern Airlines hired her for a marketing position that paid well and allowed her to travel the world. As part of the job, she worked with the airline’s legal department. That is when she caught the lawyer bug.
“My family thought I was crazy to quit this high paying job to go to law school because all they knew about lawyers were the criminal defense lawyers who advertised in our neighborhood,” she said. “My parents were shocked at my decision.”
Yvette and Family in Colorado
With profits per partner at Sidley now exceeding $3 million and Ostolaza sporting an hourly billing rate of more than $1,400, according to recent federal bankruptcy records, it is safe to say that her parents now agree she made the right choice.
To be sure, law school and the world of legal language and procedures were foreign territory for Ostolaza at the start.
In her first class, which was torts, the professor started the lecture discussing the rights of plaintiffs and defendants. Confused, Ostolaza leaned toward the classmate sitting next to her.
“What’s a plaintiff? And what are torts?”
The classmate responded, “You are kidding, right?”
She was not, but she survived and thrived. She graduated magna cum laude and served as articles editor for the University of Miami Business Law Journal.
“The lesson was there is no shame in not knowing everything,” she said. “You have to ask questions. You have to observe. Most things in life are learned.”
During law school, Ostolaza did a summer clerkship with former U.S. District Judge Royal Furgeson. The Dallas office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges offered her a summer associate spot, which she accepted.
The following year, Weil offered Ostolaza a position in 1991 as an associate in its litigation practice paying $69,500. Weil paid significantly above the other Texas law firms at the time.
Ostolaza spent 22 years at Weil, where she rose in the ranks to lead the firm’s complex commercial litigation practice and was a member of Weil’s management committee.
“I loved my time there,” she said. “It is a great firm.”
Ostolaza’s first big jury trial as lead counsel came in a lawsuit she filed in 1996 for her client High Caliber Gun & Knife Shows against the City of Houston.
The city passed an ordinance that required gun show operators using city convention space or arenas to hire off-duty police officers to examine the government-issued identifications of every person entering the show and to get them to sign a document declaring all weapons in their position.
“We argued that the ordinance was unduly burdensome and did not even address the concerns the city had in drafting the ordinance,” she said.
Yvette and Peter Dewar during her first year at Weil
U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon granted summary judgment for Ostolaza’s client. A three-day jury trial followed. The jury awarded $329,000 in damages against the city and awarded Ostolaza $54,442 in legal fees.
Houston officials appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Ostolaza argued the appeal to a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, which handed her a unanimous decision affirming the lower court judgment.
“I was so nervous while the jury was out,” she said. “Even though I am confident in my case and my preparation, I am never over-confident about what a jury or a judge might rule.
“The great thing is that client is still my client to this day,” she said. “I love that our profession allows us to have long-term relationships with people and companies.”
In 2013, Ostolaza led a group of seven women equity partners and a male partner at Weil to jump to Sidley’s Dallas office. The Texas Lawbook called them “The Weil Seven Plus One” – a name that stuck.
“Moving was more about my clients,” she said. “Sidley was in the right cities for my clients and it has the right balance between corporate transactional, regulatory and litigation. Moving was not a decision I made lightly, but it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.”
As head of Sidley’s Dallas office, Ostolaza has definitely been aggressive in recruiting. The firm had less than two-dozen lawyers when she joined and most of them focused on intellectual property law. Sidley currently has about 100 lawyers in Dallas and plans to add another 20 first year associates in September.
In 2016, Ostolaza became an outspoken advocate of the Dallas Women Lawyers Association’s effort to convince the Dallas Bar Association to add a permanent position on the DBA’s governing board for a DWLA member. The DBA board initially balked, but Ostolaza and more than 600 Dallas area lawyers, judges, general counsel and law school deans signed a petition supporting the move.
The DBA reversed course and added an extra voting seat for DWLA members.
In 2019, Ostolaza spearheaded a heated legal battle for Texas Pacific Land Trust, one of the largest private landowners in the state. The dispute stemmed from a contentious proxy fight between TPL and a group of activist investors who were seeking a seat at the table when one of TPL’s coveted board of trustee seats opened up.
Though the matter settled within three months, the litigation included a lengthy and detailed complaint, punches and counter-punches in a hefty countersuit, and even navigating a rogue board meeting in Sidley’s Dallas office.
Ostolaza is also a committed believer in lawyers giving back to the community. She and Sidley together with Dallas-based Celanese Corporation and Haynes and Boone were the recipients of the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Pro Bono and Public Service for their extraordinary work on asylum cases on the border. (You can read more on that here).
“Big corporate law firms such as Sidley can help change people’s lives through pro bono,” she said. “Big law firms can dedicate a lot of resources to address issues that are systemic in our society and do it in a meaningful way.”
Ostolaza obviously recognizes the significance of her being the first Hispanic woman to lead a top 100 corporate law firm.
Yvette at the Kentucky Derby
“I have never felt that being Hispanic was a negative to my career and being able to speak two languages has certainly been a positive,” she said. “I’ve felt more discrimination as a woman than as a Hispanic.”
Numerous male lawyers earlier in her career advised her to try a transactional practice because she is a mother.
“Honey, you don’t want to be a trial lawyer and away from your family all the time,” she said they told her.
“None of us are perfect, and all of us look through the lens of where we came from,” she said. “I am proud that 50% of the Dallas partners are women.”
Cliff Vrielink, a Sidley corporate transactional partner and co-head of Sidley’s Houston office, said Ostolaza is an amazing lawyer and the perfect choice to lead the law firm.
“Yvette is tireless and settles for nothing but the best,” said Vrielink, who is a member of Sidley’s executive committee. “Because of these traits, she not only has incredible client loyalty but also has attracted and assembled a team of amazing, talented, hard-working lawyers who are at the top of the profession.”
“Another reason that Yvette will be a terrific chair is that she is an incredibly compassionate, caring and fun-loving person,” he said. “During Covid, she sent clients Shake Shack burger packages to help celebrate the Fourth of July. She organized a drive-in movie event and she reached out and called summer associates to make sure they were comfortable coming to the office and getting the most of their summer experience.
“She didn’t do any of these things because she had to,” he said. “She did it because she is passionate about people.”