Southwest Airlines senior attorney Jason Shyung will never forget his first jury trial.
Neither will his client.
In 2014, U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Toliver appointed Shyung and Jared Slade, both then associates at Alston & Bird in Dallas, to represent a pro se defendant who owned a small construction company in Sherman. A contract worker claimed he was actually an hourly employee and deserved to be paid as such under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“Our client was an older, quiet, salt-of-the-earth gentleman,” Shyung said. “A verdict for the plaintiff had the potential to destroy our client’s business and send him directly into bankruptcy. He could have lost everything.”
There was a twist: Judge Toliver appointed Shyung and Slade on July 17, 2014 – only two weeks before the start of the trial.
“We were dropped in at the last-minute right before trial began,” Shyung said. “We had to get up to speed very quickly with limited facts developed in discovery, which made preparing a defense a bit daunting.”
The plaintiff had a lawyer who had done discovery. The defendant had represented himself and sought no discovery. The duo worked around the clock in the days before trial.
“We went into the trial almost blind,” Shyung said. “The hardest part was cross-examination of the plaintiff without any discovery. We were flying by the seat of our pants. It was one of the most intense times that I can remember in my legal career knowing this man’s future was in our hands.”
For two days, they presented evidence and argued their case. The eight-person federal jury deliberated for several hours.
“At trial, I was not Perry Mason by any means and made mistakes that I still laugh about today,” he said. “Waiting for the jury to return was the most gut-wrenching day I can remember practicing law. After some stressful days, we were able to secure a complete defense verdict for our client, which was an amazing feeling and result.”
Seven years later, Shyung is a lawyer in the Southwest Airlines in-house legal department. His client is now America’s busiest airline with about 55,000 employees and a market cap of $37 billion.
When Covid-19 struck the U.S. in March 2020, he was once again working 15- to 18-hour days under extreme stress and pressure. Airline travel plummeted 95% in the middle of March, and revenues for Southwest plunged with it.
Like every other airline, Southwest flew near-empty jets around the country, experiencing a cash burn rate of $23 million a day.
In a period of three weeks, in the midst of the pandemic, Shyung played a leading role in Southwest securing billions of dollars through loans, securities offerings and payroll support from the federal government.
Southwest Chief Legal Officer Mark Shaw assigned Shyung, who is the company’s day-to-day expert on treasury operations and a member of the capital markets deal team, to be the point person in securing payroll support from the federal government during the pandemic, which helped SWA to keep enough cash-on-hand to stay afloat.
“It was a brutal few weeks,” Shyung said. “We worked until 2 a.m. many nights and we were back up at 7 a.m. We knew we were fighting for survival.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Shyung a finalist for the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department. The finalists will be honored and the winners announced at a June 3 ceremony at the George W. Bush Institute.
“Jason was responsible for working with outside counsel to gather and validate the diligence materials required by the U.S. Treasury, as well as reviewing the underlying deal documents for issues and comments,” said Stacey Cho Hernandez, a partner at Carter Arnett and president of the Dallas Asian American Bar Association.
“Jason was also responsible for tracking due diligence requests to ensure any issues raised by Southwest’s general counsel and deputy general counsel were properly addressed,” said Hernandez, who nominated Shyung for the honor.
Bailey Pham, a partner for Vinson & Elkins in Dallas, has worked with Shyung on several corporate transactions.
“The one constant is that we all know we can count on [Jason’s] responsiveness, attention to detail and leadership to help the transaction run smoothly,” Pham said. “No matter what obstacles or issues may be present, he does an exceptional job of ensuring that the team understands and appreciates the critical business goals so that we can achieve management’s vision, create value and minimize risks for Southwest Airlines. Jason is a great lawyer and an even better teammate.”
Shyung was born in Dallas and grew up in the DFW area.
“My parents are both immigrants with amazing stories of their own,” he said. “My mother was one of the many ‘boat people’ who fled Vietnam under the cover of darkness after South Vietnam fell to the communists.
“My mother and her family miraculously made it to Hong Kong after some harrowing time out at sea where their boats got separated, yet they somehow found each other again when they made it to the calm waters outside of Hong Kong,” he said.
After spending time as refugees in Hong Kong, his mother came to the U.S. in 1979 and eventually to Dallas.
Shyung’s father’s family fled China to Taiwan after the communists took over there, and he also came to the United States in 1979 to make a new life for himself.
“Like many others, he started his life working in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants on the East Coast, and he eventually made his way to Dallas, where he met my mother and became the owner of a couple Chinese restaurants in the Colony, Frisco and Dallas,” he said. “He worked hard seven days a week in the kitchen, in the front, delivering food and doing whatever it took to provide for our family.”
The Vietnamese community in Dallas helped Shyung’s mother land a full-time job on the manufacturing line at a local semiconductor company. She also joined her husband in the restaurant business to help make ends meet.
“My parents are both hard-working people, who sacrificed greatly to ensure that their children would have a better future in the U.S.,” he said.
Shyung went to college at Southern Methodist University, where he received degrees in economics and international studies. He had thoughts of going into the medical profession or public service, but that changed when his father was victimized by a business partner who stole all of the business’ money.
“Ironically, it was the failure of lawyers to help in my family’s time of need that propelled me toward the legal profession.”
— Jason Shyung
“My father needed legal help to assert his rights, but we could not afford a lawyer and we were not able to get any legal help,” he said. “The resulting consequences were disastrous for my dad, and we are still dealing with the consequences to this day.”
“Ironically, it was the failure of lawyers to help in my family’s time of need that propelled me toward the legal profession,” he said.
Shyung planned to go to law school on the East Coast “to get the coveted Ivy League stamp of approval” on his resume. But a friend encouraged him to at least visit the University of Virginia School of Law.
“After doing some frigid campus tours in the Northeast, I thought it could not hurt to see what UVA had to offer,” he said. “I was amazed that the students there seemed to actually lovetheir time at law school – versus merely surviving it.”
In 2008, Shyung graduated from UVA and became the first lawyer in his family.
Shyung clerked for one year for Judge Catharina Haynes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – a decision that he said has had “an enormous impact on my legal career.”
“The rigorous intellectual, legal, professional and ethical training that I received in her chambers made me a better lawyer, and my time there engrained in me certain values and a work ethic that are a part of who I am today,” he said. “I do not think I would be where I am today if I had not clerked for Judge Haynes.”
Shyung spent two and a half years at Andrews Kurth – now Hunton AK – and three years at Alston & Bird.
During his final year at Alston & Bird, Shyung tackled a pro bono asylum case that he said was “a high stakes matter that really hit home for me.”
A young Ethiopian man had fled to the U.S. because he was tortured and persecuted for “being a part of the political opposition in his home country.”
The migrant and his family had been threatened by government officials in his homeland.
An immigration officer initially rejected his asylum petition because of “some misunderstandings and other issues” with the Department of Homeland Security. The Human Rights Initiative believed he would achieve asylum if he had legal representation.
“I jumped at the opportunity to take on his case,” Shyung said. “At first, he was quiet and reserved. It took some effort to get him to tell us what happened to him, and when he finally did, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’
“He was involved in a peaceful protest and he was arrested and beaten and tortured,” he said. “His wife was taken and, while we do not know what happened to her while in custody, it was bad enough that she ultimately left him. He was still wearing his wedding ring when I met him. This man entrusted his life to us. I didn’t realize at first how emotional the case would become for me.”
Shyung handled all the pretrial matters, finalized the briefs and lined up a great team of experts and lawyers, who completed the mission and secured the asylum his client was entitled to receive.
Shyung took an in-house job at Accudyne and he turned over the case to Alston & Bird associate Michael Lee, who secured the asylum ruling for their client.
In 2015, Shyung was offered an in-house position at Accudyne, which was owned by the Carlye Group and BC Partners, two premier private equity firms that were trying to turn around some recently acquired assets.
Accudyne GC Kevin McGlinchey and deputy GC Julie Taggart “presented me with a compelling opportunity to go from my more reactive litigation role (putting out fires once they have started) to a proactive one.”
“I could continue to manage litigation but also work on corporate matters and take a proactive role in avoiding issues and building a successful company,” he said. “After discovering that such roles are difficult to find and are not typically open to litigators, I took the chance to do something different, and I have never regretted my decision to make the move.”
In 2018, Shyung heard about an open position on the corporate transactions team in the legal department at Southwest Airlines that he thought fit his skillset.
“The offer was something I could not refuse,” he said.
An early nontransactional legal assignment Shyung handled involved an internal project of the airline called “Herb Kelleher’s Celebration of Life.”
“When I prepared for my interviews at Southwest, I read a lot of articles about Herb, and I listened to a number of interviews he did. He seemed like a funny, brilliant and great leader, and I hoped to meet him after I joined Southwest,” he said. “However, that was not to be, and when Herb passed away suddenly in 2019, there was a need to move quickly to get things in place to celebrate his life and work at Southwest.”
Shyung was tasked with identifying all the legal matters that involved Kelleher for his celebration of life.
“While losing Herb was a very difficult way to start 2019, the people at Southwest were determined to make 2019 a banner year that honored Herb’s legacy, and 2019 in many ways was such a year for the company,” he said.
Then came March 2020 and the devastation that Covid-19 brought the airline industry.
“A lot of us had to step up and do things we had never done before and work around the clock to ensure the company would be able to survive the downturn,” he said. “For me, that meant being a part of major finance deals and securing critical government support from the U.S. Treasury.”
To understand the significance of the work and the dollars involved, here is a sample of the tight timeline of the some of the transactions Shyung led or played a significant role in achieving:
April 20 – Closed a $3.3 billion in payroll support from the federal government under the CARES Act;
April 28 – Raised $2.3 billion through a common stock offering;
April 28 – Raised $2.3 billion in convertible notes; and
April 29 – Raised $2 billion in unsecured notes.
“Those transactions helped us secure the cash we needed to survive and avoid involuntary layoffs and pay cuts,” he said. “I do not think I will ever be able to top the impact that those deals had in protecting the livelihood of so many people and preserving a special company like Southwest for future employees and airline consumers in general.”
Pham, who worked on many of these transactions for Southwest, said Shyung’s “attitude and motivation are contagious” and allowed him “to focus on the most minute tasks while calmly navigating the most intricate of deals or transactions.”
“[Jason] constantly maintained a calm perspective of the larger picture and where things were moving in the aggregate while being able to immerse himself in the unknown and tackling the complexity and novelty of the CARES Act to understand and appreciate the requirements and obligations of the programs available to Southwest Airlines,” Pham said.
“While one would expect that the extreme uncertainty of the impact of the pandemic and what to expect next – as well as the multitude of demands on the Southwest Airlines team – would have created a stressful situation, you would have never known it while working with Jason,” she said. “He has a way of drilling down to the imminent tasks at hand that makes it feel like you are just putting one foot in front of the other to get to the finish line.”
For Shyung, the pandemic presented additional challenges at home. His wife is a pediatrician who had to work hard to help her patients navigate the uncertainties of the pandemic. In addition, the couple had a 1-year-old at home.
“My wife was on the front line of the pandemic and it was nuts for her, too,” he said. “It was a stressful and crazy time.”