As a teenager, Dena DeNooyer Stroh swore that she would never follow her father into the practice of law.
“Thirty years later, I can say that I almost followed my dad’s exact footsteps,” she says.
Despite being just 45, Stroh has become one of the most influential lawyers in North Texas. She is the general counsel of the North Texas Tollway Authority. She is the past president of the Dallas Women Lawyers Association, on the steering committee of the XIX Society for the Texas Women’s Foundation and vice chair of Habitat for Humanity. She is one of the leading voices in the Texas legal profession for gender and ethnic diversity.
Those who work with Stroh say she is also a “damn good lawyer.”
The DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to announce that Stroh is a finalist for the General Counsel of the Year Award for a Small Legal Department.
“Plainly stated, Dena is the complete package,” Dawn Estes, a partner at Estes Thorne & Carr, said in nominating Stroh for the award. “I feel certain that she must not sleep at all.”
Stroh and 30 other corporate legal department leaders will be honored on Jan. 24 at the Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony at the George W. Bush Institute.
During the past year, Stroh resolved a series of wall construction lawsuits, oversaw a $350 million bond refinancing and finalized the procurement for a critical back office software system that is “the backbone of NTTA toll collections efforts.”
“We are small in size as a legal department, but we are mighty,” Stroh told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview. “We had a really good year. NTTA was the first to have all electronic tolling in the country.”
This is Stroh’s second consecutive year to be a finalist for the Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards. Last year, she was a finalist for Business Litigation of the Year and M&A Deal of the Year. In 2017, Stroh and her team won a massive class action lawsuit in which hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake, and she closed a monumental $2.6 billion bond deal that was the third largest governmental bond transaction of the year.
“Dena is scary smart,” says Dallas insurance law specialist Amy E. Stewart, who has worked with Stroh for several years. “She has extraordinary diplomacy skills needed for her position, but she is also a very straight shooter.”
Lawyers also point out Stroh’s commitment to the legal profession. She mentors several younger women lawyers and served as the chair of Attorneys Serving the Community. During her year as president-elect of the Dallas Women Lawyers Association, she worked with Sidley Austin partner Angela Zambrano to push the Dallas Bar Association to finally provide the DWLA a permanent seat on its board of directors.
Dena Stroh: The Early Years
Stroh was born in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where her father was a lawyer in the Army JAG Corp. They moved quite a bit – West Point, NY; Germany; Fort Meade, MD; and Annadale, VA – until he retired as a colonel. He then went in-house at Dresser Corporation to litigate environmental matters.
“I did not want to be a lawyer growing up. I made up my mind that I was not going to do what my dad did,” she says. “My dad was a litigator who went in-house. So I, of course, am a litigator who went in-house.
“But my dad, because he worked at Dresser, came home with the best toys, such as miniature dirt-moving machines,” she says.
Stroh’s stepmother, Lynn DeNooyer, was a prominent family lawyer in Dallas who retired a few years ago.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale University, Stroh went to law school at Southern Methodist University, where she graduated in 1999. She clerked for one year for U.S. District Judge Thad Heartfield of the Eastern District of Texas.
“There’s not much you can do with a psychology degree except go to graduate school,” she says.
SMU Dedman tax law professor Chris Hannah told his students they should consider practicing corporate transactional law instead of automatically settling for litigation.
“I went to Professor Hannah after class and asked why would I want to practice in an area of law that is so cyclical,” she says. “Come to find out in 2008 and 2009, litigation is cyclical, too.”
Choosing Carrington Over O’Melveny
Two law firms – Los Angeles-based O’Melveny & Myers and Dallas-based Carrington Coleman – recruited Stroh to join their firms.
“Carrington had more women partners than O’Melveny, even though O’Melveny had 800 lawyers,” she says. “Why would I go someplace that promoted fewer women?”
Stroh says she also loved working for then-Carrington litigation partner Barbara Lynn, who became a federal judge a year later and is now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas.
Stroh spent nine years at Carrington, which promoted her to partner in 2009. She then jumped to the litigation boutique Gruber Hurst for two years to get more courtroom experience.
In 2012, Plano-based Murchison Oil & Gas hired Stroh to be its general counsel – a position she held for three years.
NTTA officials came calling in March 2015.
Seeing the Big Picture and the Details
“When I took the job, I had no idea that I would be dealing with so many constitutional law issues so often,” she says. “I have a copy of the Constitution right here in front of me. From procedural due process and privacy to search and seizure, I actually get to practice constitutional law on a regular basis. How cool is that?”
In 2017, Stroh successfully led a team of lawyers to win a seven-year class-action litigation battle brought by toll road drivers who claimed NTTA illegally charged them excessive administrative fees when the drivers failed or refused to pay their tolls. The lawsuits, which sought hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, were dismissed without NTTA paying a dime.
The NTTA general counsel scored another huge victory in 2018 when Stroh and her outside counsel brought litigation against some of the largest construction and design companies in the world for defects related to a large mechanically stabilized earth wall on the NTTA’s President George Bush Turnpike. The alleged damages exceeded $100 million.
“Due to Ms. Stroh’s hands-on involvement in the litigation – from editing and revising briefs to attending depositions and hearings – the last pending and most complex of these cases resolved in 2018,” according to the nomination submitted by Estes.
Stroh also supervised a $350 million municipal bond issuance that NTTA closed in November 2018. This followed a series of bond issuances in 2017 for a combined $2.6 billion, which was the third largest governmental bond transaction in the U.S. for the entire year.
“Dena is exceptionally bright,” says Locke Lord partner Frank Stevenson, who has worked for NTTA for several years. “She has remarkable command of numerous legal specialty areas. Just as importantly, when it’s necessary for her to engage in an issue outside her previous experience, she’s a blazingly quick study.
“Still, truly capable people like Dena know what they don’t know and address it,” Stevenson says. “Dena’s background is primarily litigation, so she selected Angela Hough, her very capable assistant general counsel and a transactional lawyer, to provide NTTA a fully complementary and complete legal team.”