Keith Calcote’s son was in third grade when Calcote and his wife noticed some strange behavior: Their son frequently made squeaking noises, dramatically rolled his eyes, banged his elbows against a table or kicked a chair repeatedly.
“We told him to stop,” Calcote said. “Cade would say ‘OK,’ but then he would keep doing it. He couldn’t tell us why and he would be upset. We knew something was not right.”
Calcote and his wife took their son to a specialist. The diagnosis: Tourette syndrome.
“Good news,” the doctor told the Calcotes in 2004, “it is not terminal. Bad news, it will get worse.”
And it did get worse. Significantly worse.
“We knew nothing about Tourette’s or what lay ahead,” said Calcote, who was a lawyer at Shell Oil at the time. “In retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t know then what we know now; otherwise, it would have been too overwhelming.”
But those who know Keith Calcote also say that it changed his life, made him a more sensitive person and even a better lawyer.
Calcote has been involved in some of the biggest corporate civil lawsuits in Texas history and last year he won a $2.3 billion tax assessment dispute – the largest such victory in Texas history. He has served as an assistant general counsel at Shell Oil, Motiva and Waste Management.
But he said his son’s diagnosis and his family’s experience with Tourette’s gave him an understanding and compassion that deeply affected his profession and faith.
“No doubt about it, this impacted me and every part of my life,” he told The Texas Lawbook. “Your perspective on issues changes when you experience this. The hard edges get rubbed off. I put myself in the other person’s shoes a little more often. It instilled empathy and patience that I definitely didn’t have before Cade’s Tourette’s.”
For the past decade, Calcote has been a zealous advocate supporting children with Tourette’s. He serves on the Tourette Association of Texas board and helped the organization raise more than $1 million. He and his wife, Jyl, chaired the TSA’s annual dinner gala, which funds programs that educate teachers about Tourette’s and provides resources to low-income families that have children with Tourette’s.
Most interestingly, in 2012, Calcote founded Targets for Tourette’s, an annual premiere clay shooting fundraiser that includes dinner, dancing and an auction that takes place every April. Because of his efforts, more than 100 Texas children with Tourette’s spend spring break together each year.
“Tourette kids from all over Texas come together and see other kids with Tourette’s without fear of being made fun of or bullied,” he said. “Many of these children have never met another kid with Tourette’s. It shows them they are not alone, that there are others like them.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook, citing his work for children with Tourette syndrome, is honoring Calcote with the 2020 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Pro Bono and Public Service. “Keith has had an unbelievably positive, lasting and direct impact on those living with TS in Texas,” said Tourette Association of Texas Executive Director Sheryl Kadmon. “He has truly given his heart and commitment to the kids. It is because of his vision and his hands-on hard work that we can provide many of our services.
“With Keith, there is never a ‘no.’ He has truly made the impossible, possible,” Kadmon said.
Cade and Keith Calcote
Alvarez and Marsal Managing Director Bill Abington nominated Calcote for the award and said he’s an excellent lawyer.
“Keith hires good people and he lets them know their role and he lets them do their job,” Abington said. “Keith is a genuinely nice guy who brings out the best in people.”
Calcote is a Sunday School teacher, an exceptional bird hunter, a great storyteller, an Astros fan and an exceptional guitar player (“Johnny Cash wanna-be,” said Abington). He has an impressive knowledge of fine watches, cigars, guitars and famous musicians. His favorite drink: Diet Coke.
Calcote was born on the Fort Polk Army base in Louisiana where his father, an Army dentist, was stationed during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The family lived in nearby DeRidder, a small town in the Louisiana piney woods, only a few miles from the East Texas border.
“It was like being raised in Mayberry,” Calcote said, referring to the small town in the Andy Griffith Show. “The lake behind our house and the nearby woods meant I could fish and explore the wilderness with my BB gun and Zebco fishing rod after school until twilight most evenings and all day, every day in the summer.
“It was in this idyllic setting that a life-long love of the outdoors, particularly hunting and fishing, germinated and remains in me to this day,” he said.
When Calcote was in the fourth grade, his father was relocated to Okinawa, where they lived for three years. The family moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, when Calcote started seventh grade, where they stayed until he graduated from Lawton High School in 1975.
Calcote said his mother and father passed on to him a “native sense of right and wrong.”
“I got from them a moral compass,” he said. “Dad was stern but fair and always willing to listen. Mom was kind, loving, never the disciplinarian and always my cheerleader with correspondingly high expectations for my professional life. Both were strong Christians who instilled in me a strong faith.”
Calcote said most of his high school friends decided to enroll in the University of Oklahoma, but the pastor of the small Baptist church his family attended pushed him in a different direction – Baylor University in Waco.
“No one in my high school had even heard of Baylor,” he said. “[The pastor] personally drove me to Waco and took me on a full-day campus tour. We ended the day in the office of the dean of admissions, his Baylor classmate, who interviewed me and told me that I would likely be admitted.”
There was one catch: Because it was late in the admissions process, all the dorm rooms were filled. Calcote would have to live in the Waco YMCA until a room opened. He agreed. Fortunately, a dorm room opened up at the last minute.
Calcote studied pre-med his first two years of college and took several science and math classes.
“I found no joy in any of the sciences, particularly science labs,” he said. “The thought of med school and years of science classes and labs was depressing. I was drawn to writing and literature.”
While there were no lawyers in the Calcote family, he was intrigued after learning of Baylor’s “3 – 3” program – three years of undergraduate studies followed by three years of law school.
“I called dad soon thereafter to tell him I was changing my major,” he said. “The call didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.”
“Law school?” he said. “What about all the hard work to get good grades in math and science? Have you thought this through?”
Calcote had thought it through. He started law school in 1978 and graduated in 1981. He was hired by Godfrey & Decker, an old-line Fort Worth firm headed by Berl Godfrey, a 1929 graduate of Baylor Law School whose classmates included Leon Jaworski. Godfrey founded Fort Worth’s Colonial Country Club.
In 1984, Haynes and Boone hired Calcote and two Cantey & Hanger lawyers, Mark Hill and Bill Ratliff, to launch the firm’s office in Fort Worth. Other Dallas firms had tried to open offices in Fort Worth but did not have much success.
“I attribute it to a few things, chief among them the firm’s decision to hire Fort Worth lawyers, not simply to transplant Dallas lawyers to Fort Worth,” he said. “Fort Worth was at the time, and I suspect still is, an idiosyncratic place. The rivalry between Fort Worth and Dallas was very real, particularly on the west side of the Trinity River.”
Keith with wife Jyl
Calcote worked at Haynes and Boone for 13 years and became board certified in civil appellate law. He was involved in some huge litigation battles and trials, including Exxon’s dispute in 1996 with Lloyd’s of London, which had been the energy giant’s insurance carrier in the Exxon Valdez oil tanker crash and spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. The case went to trial and resulted in a $420 million judgment in favor of Exxon.
In 1997, one of Calcote’s clients, independent energy company Union Pacific Resources, offered him an in-house counsel spot.
Cade had been born a year earlier, and Calcote wanted a better balance between work and home life.
Calcote also knew something the public did not: UPR was launching a hostile bid for Pennzoil and litigation was all but certain. UPR leaders immediately got him involved.
“It was a pitched battle between two corporate titans, and both were fully lawyered up,” he said, noting that the litigation that followed was in courts in Texas, Louisiana and Delaware. “UPR was hell bent on acquiring Pennzoil and its oil and gas reserves. Pennzoil was equally determined not to be bought.”
UPR hired Skadden Arps and Dee Kelly of Kelly, Hart & Hallman, and Pennzoil had Baker Botts and Gibbs & Bruns as its counsel.
UPR offered $4 billion or $84 a share in all cash, but the Pennzoil board rejected it. Shareholder lawsuits followed alleging corporate malfeasance.
“The lawsuits were a side show,” Calcote said. “The real action centered around the daily strategy sessions with repeated escalating offers made by UPR to buy Pennzoil and the news swirling around in the Wall Street Journal and all other major news outlets.”
The takeover litigation quickly evaporated when UPR withdrew its offer.
Pennzoil sold its upstream assets two years later to Oklahoma-based Devon Energy for $675 million. Also in 1999, the price of oil plummeted and Anadarko bought UPR for $4 billion.
With the merger came job cuts and consolidation. Calcote’s position disappeared.
“I decided I wanted to remain in-house and eventually opportunity came knocking,” he said. “I’m not speaking metaphorically. An in-house lawyer from Waste Management in Houston literally traveled to our home in Fort Worth to speak with me. Turns out he was a TCU alum and wanted an excuse to visit his alma mater.”
Calcote took the job, moved to Houston and spent five years in the Waste Management legal department.
Even before he moved to Houston, Calcote made community service a high priority. In Fort Worth, he served on the board of directors of the American Heart Association for six years. When he moved to Houston, the AHA executive director asked him to join its local board.
“I don’t know anyone in Houston, and I won’t do you any good,” Calcote told the executive director. “Call me back in two years.”
Exactly two years later, his phone rang and he accepted a seat on the Houston AHA board where he served for a decade.
Due to budget cuts at Waste Management, Calcote was laid off in 2004. He was not out of work long.
It was during Calcote’s transition from Waste Management to Shell when his son, Cade, was diagnosed with Tourette’s.
Shell Oil’s legal department, then led by general counsel Cathy Lamboley, made Calcote a specialist managing complex class action antitrust cases.
“During the interview process at Shell I was repeatedly asked if I had antitrust experience, to which I had to honestly respond, ‘no.’ So, it makes perfect sense that I got the job, and I was immediately assigned a complex antitrust litigation docket,” he said.
The litigation involved energy trading operations that had been spawned by Enron’s collapse. Shell, El Paso Energy, Dynegy, Duke Energy and others were the defendants. Multiple federal agencies investigated. Some traders went to prison. The government investigations were followed by civil suits in California and New York that claimed the energy traders conspired to report false price and volume information to trade publications to manipulate prices.
“It took several years and lots of money to resolve the cases, but resolve them I did,” Calcote said.
McKool Smith Principal Willie Wood worked with Calcote on a post-hurricane energy trading matter for Shell.
“Keith was very firm in carrying out the objective of the company – hold the line, don’t back down from a fight and establish a reputation that the company was going to fight very hard on cases that could have negatively impacted the gas trading industry,” Wood said. “By doing that, he discouraged other potential claims against the company.
“Courage and conviction drive strong results,” he said. “Keith is very hands on in every aspect of the case, and thus he keeps everyone on their toes and drives project performance.”
In 2008, Cade was in the seventh grade. His Tourette’s was getting more severe, and he was also suffering from severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.
“TS gradually worsens as kids enter puberty, a developmental stage that, by itself, is difficult to navigate without adding a weird disorder that attracts unwanted attention and embarrassment,” Calcote said. “Cade’s TS, anxiety and OCD became so pronounced that he could no longer attend school.”
“Sometimes, he would just curl up in a ball on the floor,” he said. “Tourette’s kids are disruptive in class, so the teachers don’t like it. It is difficult for them to assimilate. The worst part of Tourette’s is not the tics. It is the horrible anxiety. The kids don’t sleep. That is a recipe for disaster.
“So, they get kicked to the curb,” he said. “The hardest thing in the world is for a parent to watch their child suffer and know you can’t do anything. But it softens your heart.”
The Calcotes took Cade out of school and enrolled him at the Tenney School, which he said was a Godsend. Tenney, a private school in Houston that offers a one teacher to one student ratio, was better able to accommodate his condition.
Meanwhile, the Calcotes were also getting more and more involved with the Tourette Syndrome Association of Houston. The couple chaired the organization’s annual gala in 2009, which was its only fundraising event.
TSA’s executive director asked Cade, who was going through the roughest time of his life as he battled Tourette’s, anxiety and OCD, to be a keynote speaker at the dinner.
“I was so nervous when Cade went to the podium that night, I hardly heard him,” Calcote said. “My fear was that after all the pain and trauma he had been through, if he froze in front of a large crowd and embarrassed himself, it would be too much for him to bear. I was a nervous wreck.
“At dinner I couldn’t eat,” he said. “When Cade was introduced as the keynote speaker, my stomach was in knots. I remember him slowly walking to the stage. He began speaking but I wasn’t focused on the words. I was waiting for him to fall apart.”
But Cade did not fall apart.
Without notes or a hint of anxiety, Cade Calcote eloquently told the hundreds of those attending what he had been through and how it felt to have Tourette’s. It was a child’s honest assessment of his experience.
When he finished, everyone in the ballroom room jumped to their feet and applauded. Many in attendance had tears in their eyes.
“I learned a lot about myself that night and even more about my son,” Calcote said.” I should not have assumed he would fail. The strength he exhibited that night is a strength he continues to show daily. It was a formative experience for him and for me. He will tell you that Tourette’s has made him a stronger more empathetic person and, oddly, he is thankful for it. I am thankful for him.”
After the gala, Calcote told TSA Executive Director Sherly Kadman that the group needed additional fundraising events. He suggested a sporting clays shoot.
“Sure,” Sheryl Kadman responded. “What’s a sporting clays shoot?”
“Although I enjoyed shooting sporting clays for fun, I had never organized a competitive sporting clays event. How hard could it be, right?” Calcote told The Lawbook. “What literally started as a few scribbles on a Goode Co. Barbecue napkin at lunch with the TSA director became ‘Targets for Tourette’s.’”
Calcotte created a “T4T” logo because he wanted to create a distinctive brand for the event.
The inaugural Targets for Tourette’s charity clay shoot, a cowboy themed event, was in 2012. They sold shooting teams at price levels ranging from $20,000 (John Wayne level), $10,000 (Cliff Eastwood), $5,000 (Matt Dillon) and $2,500 (Roy Rogers).
The clay shoot took place in the afternoon. That was followed by hundreds of people attending a reception, awards ceremony and dinner under a big top tent.
“We had a live auction with actual live longhorns sold at the event, and a saddled longhorn steer named ‘Buckaroo’ on which you could sit and have a photo taken,” he said.
The first year, the event grossed $120,000, which funded the spring break camp for Tourette’s kids from all over Texas. To date, Targets for Tourette’s has grossed over $1 million.
In 2014, Motiva Enterprises, a 50/50 joint venture of Shell and Saudi Aramco, offered Calcote the position of associate general counsel and head of litigation. He spent six years at Motiva and oversaw several multimillion-dollar disputes, including fraud, tax and insurance matters.
His biggest legal victory at Motiva came in 2019 when he filed a lawsuit in Jefferson County disputing the assessed value of the company’s Port Arthur refinery, which is the largest oil refinery in North America. As a result of Calcote’s efforts, Motiva had its property tax assessment reduced by $2.2 billion in 2017 and reduced $2.3 billion in 2018. Those are the largest reduced assessed value for tax purposes in Texas history.
Due to the energy downturn and the COVID-19 pandemic, Motiva had layoffs in August. Calcote’s position was one of those eliminated.
Lawyers who work with Calcote say he will not be unemployed for long.
“Keith’s intellect, practical sense and broad experience across several industries and private practice have given him and extraordinary depth of perspective and creativity in resolving legal issues,” said Kenneth Broughton, a partner at Reed Smith in Houston.
“I know his talents firsthand, having been associates and partners together litigating a huge variety of commercial disputes across Texas,” Broughton said. “The sheer variety of legal issues he analyzed, handled and resolved have made him a real go-to counselor and advisor on so many diverse legal issues.
“Keith is one of the most talented and well-rounded people I know,” he said. “Devoted to family and friends, avid traveler, musician and just a lot of fun.”