Oct. 14, 2020, was a routine workday during the Covid-19 pandemic for Helmerich & Payne International Drilling General Counsel Debra Stockton when she received an email from a Dallas lawyer who had previously done work for H&P.
A federal lawsuit had just been filed by Houston-based Nabors Drilling Technologies in the Northern District of Texas claiming that H&P’s Dallas-based subsidiary, Motive Drilling, had infringed on eight of Nabors’ patents related to technology on its automated drilling products and sought hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Nabors, a direct competitor and sometimes business partner of H&P, sought an immediate preliminary injunction to stop H&P’s sale of the disputed products and asked the federal judge for an expedited jury trial.
Working under intense pressure and deadlines, Stockton put together a team of three H&P in-house counsel, interviewed several outside law firms and hired Baker Botts to lead the company’s defense. She then aggressively led H&P’s discovery efforts, initiated an investigation into Nabors’ own automated drilling technology and filed counterclaims of infringement against Nabors.
Over the four years that followed, the litigation was aggressive and the end result was extraordinary.
“Debra’s first key decision in the case was to act quickly and decisively,” said Baker Botts IP partner Doug Kubehl, who led the litigation team for H&P. “A natural reaction to a mountain of allegations like this might be to look for a way to quickly and quietly resolve the case. But Debra and her team wanted to do the right thing. Debra acted immediately to assemble and direct analysis of all of the key witnesses and documents.”
“At the end of the day, Debra’s persistence and grit turned what started with an aggressive competitor seeking extraordinary relief against her company into complete vindication for H&P,” Kubehl said. “That vindication came both in terms of clearing H&P’s name from incorrect infringement allegations and in protecting H&P’s own valuable patented inventions.”
U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn rejected Nabors’ plea for injunctive relief and then, in July 2023, dismissed the patent infringement claims against H&P, but she allowed H&P claims against Nabors to go to trial.
On July 31, 2023, Judge Lynn took the extraordinary step of “realigning” the case style to Helmerich and Payne International Drilling v. Nabors Drilling Technologies.
At the end of a two-week jury trial, the parties reached a confidential out-of-court settlement.
“This case is an incredibly rare example of an accused party ‘flipping the v’ to — in one fell swoop — both vindicate itself from baseless allegations of wrongdoing while at the same time exposing the aggressor party as the real wrongdoer,” Kubehl said in nominating Stockton for the award. “Getting there was no easy task. This case involved multiple complex patents, a fast-paced schedule, and incredibly high stakes.”
Citing this extraordinary courtroom success, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook named H&P, Stockton and Baker Botts as one of two finalists for the 2024 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook will honor award finalists and announce the winners on Jan. 30 at the annual DFW Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony at the George W. Bush Institute.
In an exclusive interview with The Lawbook, Stockton said the litigation against Nabors was critically important for H&P for numerous reasons, even beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
“I think any time you are sued by a competitor, customers are watching, vendors are watching and the industry is watching,” Stockton said. “Technology — at least the type of technology that was at issue in this case — was relatively new to the drilling industry, and it was important that H&P not only defended itself against accusations of infringement but also established that we had valuable technology and patents as well, and we would protect our own technology and patents from infringement.”
Cara Hair, senior vice president and chief legal and corporate compliance officer at Helmerich and Payne, said Stockton has led numerous successes and achievements for H&P during her seven years at the company, including transformative acquisitions.
But the patent case was clearly an “incredible result” for H&P.
“The Nabors litigation had significant financial, reputational and operational implications for H&P,” Hair said. “Debra assembled a strong legal team, crafted a compelling defense strategy and presented evidence to refute Nabors’ claims. Not only did Debra successfully defend the claims made against H&P, she asserted counterclaims that essentially ‘flipped’ the litigation into one where, at the time of trial, the only remaining claims were those being made by H&P against Nabors. Throughout the multiyear case, she communicated effectively with stakeholders and protected the organization’s long-term interests.”
Gibson Dunn corporate transactional partner Hillary Holmes said Stockton is an “extremely talented lawyer” who “takes care to listen before giving advice.”
“Debra is one of those corporate counsels who take the time to understand and factor in the business goals and risks when giving her advice. She is a strategic thinker,” Holmes said. “The HP legal team is incredible. It’s like a football team with all the right players in the right positions. They coordinate with and support each other seamlessly to reach the collective goal.”
Drafting Contracts in Second Grade
Stockton was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her mom was an insurance agent for Bryce Insurance — now part of Gallagher — and her dad worked his entire career in various capacities, including marketing, at The Williams Companies.
While Stockton had no lawyers in her family, there were early indications that the law could be a future.
“My mom always tells the story about me writing a contract between me and my little sister when I was in something like second grade,” she said. “I still have it somewhere. It had something to do with her being in my room and having to do my chores if she didn’t ask permission to play with my dolls. She also used to tell me that she went back to work when I was a young toddler because she got tired of arguing with me. I also had a teacher that I greatly respected whose husband was a lawyer, and she always talked about his work, which I found fascinating. I think my mom planted the seed early on, and it was just something I always felt like I wanted to do.”
For college, she attended Northeastern State University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration. She received her law degree from the University of Tulsa in 1994.
Right out of law school, Stockton made the decision to go straight in-house and joined The Williams Companies as a senior attorney, where she worked for its telecommunications operations.
“It was a decision I made early on in my career,” she said. “With my dad working at Williams, he often worked with their in-house lawyers and talked about how they helped him. Because I was always more interested in business and contracting, I thought that was a natural fit for me. I enjoy learning about the business and being involved in the business and being able to provide practical legal advice that helps a business achieve its goals.”
Stockton, a diehard fan of the University of Oklahoma Sooners, spent four years as a partner at Connors & Winters. In 2008, EverGreen Solutions hired Stockton as its chief legal officer. A year later EverGreen was acquired by Dallas-based RealPage. She stayed at RealPage in different legal positions for eight years.
In 2017, H&P hired Stockton as senior counsel and promoted her to general counsel within a year.
“Debra has a deep understanding of legal issues and H&P’s strategic business priorities, allowing her to navigate complex challenges with clarity and precision,” Hair said. “She is proactive and solutions oriented. She anticipates risks, provides practical guidance and aligns legal strategies with the company’s objectives. Debra fosters a culture of integrity and collaboration within the legal team, empowering members to excel while aligning their efforts with the organization’s broader goals.”
Steve Borgman, a partner at Kilpatrick Townsend, said Stockton has a pleasant personality that encourages people to “want to help her find the right resolution of an issue.”
“Debra has the rare ability to keep track of the details that matter for legal issues while still keeping the big picture in mind and also looking for practical solutions,” Borgman said. “Too many attorneys get lost in the details and fail to grasp the need for a practical approach, or do not pay enough attention to the details and as a result miss out on a practical solution.”
Stockton said her biggest challenge during the seven years she has been at H&P has been guiding the company through tremendous change.
“When I joined H&P in 2017, H&P had really always just been a drilling company,” she said. “H&P at one time had some exploration and production operations, but that business had been split off. Within the first year or so of me being at H&P, we acquired five technology companies.”
“H&P went from being primarily a drilling company with physical assets to being a drilling company with software and product development focus,” she said. “Helping the company adapt to its new emphasis on intellectual property has been a challenge.”
“But that is also what I enjoy most about my job.”
Then came the Nabors patent infringement litigation.
Mapping the Path to Victory
Stockton said she put together an internal team of three lawyers and then started the search for outside counsel to lead the litigation.
“We went through a pretty extensive interview process to select the firm that would represent us in this litigation,” she said. “We provided each firm with the complaint and then scheduled a meeting with each firm. We asked them to provide bios and include in the meeting any members of the team that would work on the case, include a discussion of strategy and their experience in handling competitor patent litigation matters.”
“We then rated each firm on experience in competitor patent matters, experience in our particular industry, ability for the team/firm to handle a complicated matter that would involve a lot of work, experience in the jurisdiction and with the judge and our overall feel for the team,” she said.
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Debra Stockton discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Stockton said her team felt the Baker Botts lawyers “had the necessary credentials, had good input on strategy and would be a culture fit in working with our team.”
The H&P team selected Baker Botts because “we knew [they] could handle the workload that would be required to defend and also assert the types of claims that were at issue in the matter.”
“We needed a firm that we knew would be able to keep up with all of the activity that was going to be involved in a case that would ultimately involve 12 patents not only in the district court litigation but also filings and hearings before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,” she said.
Because the Nabors litigation “was such a complicated case,” the legal team developed multiple legal strategies. Stockton said Ellen Cordell, who is H&P’s managing counsel for litigation, and H&P corporate counsel Kim Fink played pivotal roles.
The other lawyers describe Stockton’s involvement as “hands-on.”
“I definitely had an expectation of being informed, being involved in decisions and the development of strategy,” she said.
Lawyers for Nabors asserted eight patents in one lawsuit. Most patent disputes in the energy industry involve mechanical inventions. These patents focused on highly complex computer software that automatically steers an underground directional drill.
The second step in developing the legal strategy, according to Stockton, was examining “the technology that our competitor was using” to evaluate potential “counterclaims that [Nabors may have been] infringing H&P patented technology.”
Stockton said the primary legal and factual argument that was critical to her litigation win were that H&P’s products that Nabors complained were infringing “did not operate in the way that was alleged by the competitor and were different than what was set forth in the competitors’ patents and therefore were noninfringing.”
Nabors claims were “directed to an abstract idea and did not have additional elements that transformed the nature of the claim,” she said.
By contrast, the products developed by the competitor did infringe H&P patents.
“Probably the most critical turning point in the litigation was that after depositions and receiving final expert reports, H&P filed a motion to strike portions of the competitor’s infringement report, which was granted by the court,” Stockton said. “This ultimately forced the competitor to agree to a stipulated judgment of noninfringement and stipulated dismissal on the five remaining patents in the case. This then left only the competitor’s infringement of H&P patents in the case.”
Once H&P had defeated Nabors’ claims, Stockton “made the unique strategic move to investigate whether the competitor itself had been playing fairly in the marketplace,” Kubehl said, noting that she directed her team “to investigate whether the competitor had been using any of H&P’s technology in its own products.”
“This was a significant and complex effort,” Kubehl said. “It involved engaging company resources to identify patents, outside counsel to analyze those patents and outside retained experts to develop evidence that could be used to prove the competitor was infringing H&P’s patents.”
The investigation unearthed discovery that showed that Nabors had been studying H&P’s earlier-developed products in the technology space and had developed a copycat product of H&P’s, which were the basis of H&P’s counterclaims that led to the confidential settlement at the end of the two-week trial in 2023.
FUN FACTS: Debra Stockton
- Favorite book: I love to read and have many favorites. The last book I read that I really enjoyed was Atomic Habits. I’m not very good at routine, so I appreciated the practical aspect of how to do better at making things a habit.
- Favorite music group: I’m a 70s music girl, so I would say the Eagles, although Doobie Brothers, Bee Gees and ABBA are up there too.
- Favorite movie: I am one of those people that can’t watch a movie twice. Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knightare a couple that I would highlight.
- Favorite restaurant: A filet at any great steakhouse. Mahogany and Fleming’s are two of my favorites in Tulsa. Perry’s in Dallas — mostly because Todd Benson, who used to work for H&P, is like Norm from Cheers there, and I have great memories of eating there with him and other of my friends from Dallas.
- Favorite beverage: Espresso martini.
- Favorite vacation: 10th anniversary trip to Maui, Hawaii.
- Hero in life: Definitely my parents. They taught me faith and the value of hard work. They exemplify what it means to have a Christ-centered marriage and have been married for 63 years. I aspire to be as good of a parent to my kid as they were to me.