Houston appellate law expert Kimberly Phillips has long been an advocate for increased diversity in the legal and energy sectors.
Now, she is advocating from a new lofty position: general counsel of global litigation at Shell Oil Company.
The world’s second largest oil and gas company announced last month that the former law partner at Gardere was taking over the leadership position to oversee all litigation worldwide. She will continue to be based in Houston.
A 1993 graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston, Phillips is board certified in civil appellate law and is widely respected in the closely-knit appellate law community. She currently serves on the Texas Supreme Court Rules Committee and is a member of the executive committee for the Institute for Energy Law.
Phillips started her career as a briefing attorney for the chief justice of the Dallas Court of Appeals. She joined the Gardere law firm in 1994 and made partner in 2001.
In 2006, Shell hired Phillips as a senior counsel in its in-house litigation section. She was promoted to associate general counsel in 2011.
Thanks to the new position, Phillips is also one of the very few African-American women general counsel in the oil patch. Publicly, she has encouraged law firms and businesses to do more to encourage young people to consider law and science for their careers.
In a 2018 presentation to the National Urban League conference in Ohio, Phillips praised Shell’s diversity efforts and challenged other business leaders.
“We have our own long history of inclusion and reaching out to help this generation and the next make their dreams come true,” she said. “In order to build the future that we all want, the future that we all deserve, we need energy. We need energy to power innovation, energy to light up the darkest corners of our cities, energy to power imagination, energy to power jobs for every community. We need young people to look to energy for their future careers.”
Phillips said that parents should “encourage the children in your lives to be interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
The Shell legal department employs about 700 lawyers in-house and another 300 non-lawyer professionals.