Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
For the first full week of 2026, the CDT Roundup saw 18 transactions with a reported total value of nearly $9 billion (specifically $8.958 billion), the majority of which from just three deals. About a dozen firms circled back in early January with private equity or private investment deals that closed in mid-December.
And since we’re closing the books on 2025, let’s pause for a brief look at the numbers specific to The Roundup in this week’s edition.
Kathleen Benner’s first job out of college, armed with a marketing degree, was traveling between manufacturing facilities to sell corrugated boxes.
“After about a year, I decided that if I wanted a more respectable and sustainable environment, I’d need a career change,” she told The Texas Lawbook.
Benner went to a bookstore and bought a book about whether to seek an MBA or a JD. “I didn’t even know what a JD was, but I read the book in one day and decided to go to law school,” she said. “That decision was validated almost immediately.”
Now the associate general counsel at Children’s Health System of Texas, Benner has been named as one of two finalists for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department (six to 20 attorneys) by The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook.
In this Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, Kathleen Benner discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Hicks Johnson attorney Dave Finkel’s passion for riding horses took him 6,000 miles away from his home in Houston earlier this year. He was among 45 brave souls who participated in the 10-day Mongol Derby, which is the world’s longest equestrian endurance race.
Cameasha Turner was in the third grade when her mother told her the story of her father’s wrongful conviction and life-prison sentence. “It was truly a life-altering moment for me. My dad was 18 when he was wrongfully convicted,” Turner told The Texas Lawbook. “Hearing that as a child was heavy. I didn’t know how to process the shame or the hurt, but I did know one thing: It wasn’t right. Wanting justice for my dad is what sparked it, but understanding the power of education is what carried me the rest of the way.”
More than two decades later, Cam Turner is corporate counsel at Dallas-based Brinker where she is making major decisions and achieving significant successes on the operations of the multibillion-dollar hospitality company whose restaurant brands include Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Lawbook have named Turner as a finalist for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year, which is awarded to counsel who have been in-house for three years or less.
In this Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, Cameasha Turner discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Never before has the role of Texas lawyers been more important when it comes to meeting the legal needs of those in poverty, those who are disenfranchised or disadvantaged, those who are military veterans or single parents and children facing abusive environments. Never has the issue of diversity and inclusion in the legal profession been more important or more newsworthy.
For three years now, The Texas Lawbook has covered the work of Texas lawyers — from law firm partners and associates to in-house counsel — who stepped forward on their own time and at their own expense to help others.
In 2025, Texas Lawbook pro bono, public service and diversity reporter Krista Torralva published 127 articles highlighting the pro bono and public service work of more than 400 Texas lawyers and firms.
As our colleagues on PBS and NPR say, this is only possible with the help of contributions from folks like you.
When Johnny Carson used to parody astronomer Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show, he’d stretch out the words “billions and billions” to accentuate the astronomer’s Mid-Atlantic delivery. The line became so famous that many people assumed Sagan said it.
He never did.
Yet Sagan, with some humor about it, leaned into the myth, even later calling one of his books Billions & Billions as a nod to Carson’s cosmic exaggeration.
Now we have to borrow the phrase again. Not to describe galaxies or particles of star stuff, but to capture the sheer scale of billion-dollar-plus deals handled by Texas lawyers last year.
The Texas Supreme Court released an order this week stating it will no longer rely on the American Bar Association accreditation to determine which law schools’ students can sit for the bar exam. Right now, all ABA-accredited law schools are on the list, but non-accredited schools could be added depending on what the justices decide. Law firm leaders and law school deans weighed in on the change.
Charles Schwab’s relocation of its global headquarters, including its 150-member corporate legal department, from San Francisco to a 70-acre campus in Westlake’s Circle T Ranch development is complete, and by all accounts, the transition has been hugely successful. The move required a significant amount of infrastructure work by the legal department for Schwab, a multinational financial services company with more than 32,000 employees, $11 trillion in assets under management and a market cap of $178 billion.
“The move itself was real legal work, including banking charter conversions and building new relationships with Texas regulators and the Dallas Fed, and we found the same constructive, execution-oriented approach throughout,” Schwab General Counsel Peter Morgan told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview.
Morgan said Schwab’s hiring of two Dallas prominent lawyers — Winstead shareholder Michael O’Neal and Jones Day partner and former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Regional Director Shamoil Shipchandler — were critical parts of the transition. In the interview, Morgan discusses the Texas legal and business markets and the challenges ahead.
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