In 1997, Jim Plohg was finishing college at Texas A&M and he had a decision to make. He wanted to be a businessman, but he realized getting a first-class MBA required up to five years of additional schooling.
“I was too impatient to wait for that, so I chose to go to law school, instead, because they would accept kids straight out of undergrad,” he says. “Such are the small moments that set in motion the path of a lifetime.”
Today, he is glad he made the choice he did. The internet bubble popped a couple of years later, the Enron and MCI Worldcom frauds were exposed and the business demand for corporate compliance counsel exploded.
Plohg (Plo – like blow – with h and g that are silent) is now the associate general counsel and chief compliance officer at Dallas-based Ashford Inc., a publicly traded hospitality industry asset management firm, which serves as external adviser to Ashford Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, which have more than 130 hotels, 28,000 rooms and approximately $8.1 billion in assets.
During the past three years, Plohg has played a critical role in 10 transactions, including a couple transformational deals last year.
“My greatest success so far at Ashford is to have played an integral role in the creation and success of its services line of business, which we have largely achieved so far through M&A transactions,” says Plohg, who is 45. “We started from scratch three years ago and have acquired and built some incredible services businesses, and we’re not done yet.”
Citing Plohg’s success, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to have the 2001 Baylor University Law School alum as a finalist for the 2019 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department Award.
“When you’re hyper-focused, like you have to be on the racetrack, all those other thoughts or concerns you typically have going on in your head disappear completely.”
Locke Lord partner Will Becker, who nominated Plohg for the award, says the “legal and compliance matters that Jim handles at Ashford are complex and multifaceted.”
“Jim has led Ashford Inc.’s expansion into operations and businesses that complement operations of the hotels owned by Ashford Trust and Braemar,” Becker says. “He has led the legal team with respect to the negotiation for, and acquisition of, such businesses and the implementation of such businesses within Ashford Inc. and its subsidiaries.”
Plohg was born in a small steel town just outside of Gary, Indiana. His father was an insurance company executive who worked in small towns throughout Indiana and Illinois. His mother stayed at home to raise the children.
“I developed a real passion for business at a young age,” he says. “In fact, one of my first memorable heroes was – funny enough – Alex P. Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox in Family Ties. So, I really wanted to be in business when I grew up.”
Plohg’s older brother went to college at Texas A&M, so he decided to go there, too.
In college, Plohg discovered a second love: racing cars.
“I’ve loved cars since I was a kid,” he says. “I grew up going to the Indy 500, collected Matchbox cars, read every issue of Road & Track. I even started a high-end car detailing business in high school and college to earn money and to be near and play with the exotic cars I read and dreamed of.”
Plohg started racing cars in college but took a long hiatus. In 2015, he decided to do it again.
He currently races a Porsche 911 GT3 at two tracks – Eagles Canyon Raceway north of Dallas and Circuit of the Americas in Austin, where he hits speeds of up to 160 MPH.
“One of the real joys of sports car racing, for me, is the complete mental quietness the sport brings,” he says. “As a senior lawyer in a complex organization, not to mention a busy family life, like everyone else, I have a million things running through my mind every day.
“When you’re hyper-focused, like you have to be on the racetrack, all those other thoughts or concerns you typically have going on in your head disappear completely,” he says. “Everything that typically swirls around in your mind is wiped clean so you can devote all your mental faculties to going as fast as possible and bringing yourself and your car home in one piece.”
After receiving his business degree in 1997, Plohg made the decision to go to law school at Baylor and, after getting his law degree and license in 2001, accepted an offer to practice at Fulbright & Jaworski, which is now Norton Rose Fulbright.
“Keep in mind that this was at the time that the dotcom bubble was bursting, and no one needed another corporate lawyer,” he says. “But Fulbright had the long-term in mind and invested in me.”
“At Fulbright, I received the best education a future in-house general counsel could ask for – two years of litigation experience followed by two years of corporate experience, primarily in M&A and securities,” he says. “The partners at Fulbright were generous enough to let me explore these different departments that ultimately have proved to be the two main pillars of experience a general counsel needs.”
After four years at Fulbright, Plohg used his corporate compliance expertise to go in-house with a trio of hedge funds over the next decade, including Highland Capital Management, Alden Capital and MeehanCombs.
Plohg says he went in-house because he wanted “to be more intimately involved in business than pure law practices allow you to get.”
“I wanted to have one client that I knew deeply well so that I could participate more meaningfully in my legal advice and also in pure business matters, such as strategy, product development and execution,” he says.
When Plohg joined Highland Capital in 2004, he says the hedge fund was “at the vanguard of the then burgeoning and red-hot hedge fund industry.”
“Everyone at Highland Capital was young, smart and hungry, and Highland Capital had an entrepreneurial energy back then that was captivating,” he says. “They had bottled lightning, and I wanted to be part of it.”
Plohg says Highland Capital leaders “worked like crazy, partied equally as crazy” and achieved significant success in the investment industry.
“I always like to say that my four years at Highland taught me the equivalent of eight years of experience anywhere else,” he says. “Highland has its detractors – and rightfully so in some cases – but my experience there was nothing short of wonderful.”
In 2007, Plohg joined New York-based Alden Capital as its general counsel for four years and then MeehanCombs, a hedge fund based in Connecticut, for two years.
“It was a dream come true to be general counsel and chief compliance officer of industry-leading hedge funds on Wall Street right in the epicenter of the financial world,” he says. “But I traveled between Dallas and New York on a weekly basis – keeping a house in Dallas with my wife and kids and an apartment in New York for me during the week.
“As my wife and I began having kids, we decided our family was our most important priority, and we decided to move back to Dallas permanently,” he says.
In the late spring 2014, Plohg received a call from a friend and partner at Akin Gump saying that Ashford was “looking for an attorney to help them start and grow certain businesses in the alternative investments space.”
“I jumped at the opportunity to join,” he says.
Plohg joined Ashford in June 2014 and was put right to work helping then Ashford General Counsel David Brooks and other corporate executives spin off Ashford Inc. from Ashford Hospitality Trust – a transaction that closed in November 2014.
The deal-making didn’t stop there. Plohg has been involved in a dozen or so transactions during his nearly six years at Ashford.
Last year, Ashford acquired hotel management firm Remington Holdings for $275 million and purchased most of the assets of Key West-based Sebago, a leading provider of watersports activities and excursion services for $7 million.
“My role at Ashford has grown and morphed into something much different than what it started out as, and no small thanks to the leaders at Ashford who honor personal growth and ambition as well as provide an abundance of opportunities for their associates to create their own career path and actually seize it,” he says.
Plohg says that Brooks, the GC who hired him, and current Ashford GC, Rob Haiman, have been two wonderful mentors.
“They both taught me, better than anyone before, how to handle the people side of law,” he says. “They both have an uncanny knack for making our clients feel truly comfortable that they have received world class legal and business advice, even in instances where the answers were not what those clients wanted to hear.
“They showed me how to turn the science of law into art,” he says.