The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have created a new award category for the 2024 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards.
The DFW Corporate Legal Department of the Year honor recognizes in-house working as a team to achieve extraordinary success.
“We’ve honored GCs of the Year, Senior Counsels of the Year, Business Litigation and M&A Deal of the Year, but we realized that there are situations where corporate legal departments may have major initiatives on multiple fronts or facing a significant crisis while also dealing with major transitions within their companies,” said Texas Lawbook publisher Brooks Igo. “We needed an award that looked at the bigger picture by examining all the different challenges.”
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook selected a panel of independent judges, which include several in-house counsel who are previous recipients of DFW Corporate Counsel Awards, to review nominations. The judges selected two finalists for the new DFW Corporate Legal Department of the Year Award for 2024. They are:
Keurig Dr Pepper, led by Chief Legal Officer Anthony Shoemaker, has 34 lawyers and 17 other legal professionals in its legal department. Russell Newhouse of Newhouse + Noblin nominated Keurig Dr Pepper for the award.
Taxwell is a national digital tax filing platform with five lawyers led by CLO Willa Kalaidjian and includes Nicola Hobeiche, who is vice president of legal affairs. Shawn Cleveland, who is the Dallas managing partner at Baker Hostetler, nominated Taxwell for the award.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook will celebrate the finalists and announce the winners at the annual DFW Corporate Counsel Awards event at the George W. Bush Institute on Jan. 30.
In addition, The Lawbook will publish in-depth profiles of each of the finalists during the next month.
ACC-DFW and The Lawbook previously announced the winners for the other categories, including:
Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion;