Jason Shyung: Keeping Southwest in the Air During Turbulent Times

Southwest Airlines attorney Jason Shyung remembers his first trial. He met his client - the owner of a small Sherman construction company being wrongly sued by an employee - only two weeks prior to trial. "He could have lost everything," Shyung said. But Shyung and another young lawyer prevailed in federal court. Six years later, Southwest Airlines called on Shyung in its own potentially devastating crisis, and the young lawyer again prevailed. This is his story.

June 2, 2021 Mark Curriden

From Hippies and Shetland Ponies to Fritos and Class Action Wins – PepsiCo’s Leanne Oliver’s Lifetime of Achievement

From developing and implementing a cutting-edge medical leave policy and creating a groundbreaking management training program on sexual harassment to winning major class action lawsuits and leading strategic corporate acquisitions, PepsiCo Foods North America GC Leanne Oliver has spent the past 25 years having an enormous impact on the company’s 300,000 workers and the Texas legal community.

“Leanne has brought enormous value to the company and to the entire legal profession," said former PepsiCo GC Larry Thompson. “No one really knows PepsiCo as well as Leanne.”

June 1, 2021 Mark Curriden

Southwest’s Mark Shaw: ‘Breadth of Issues the Past Year was Unimaginable’

Mark Shaw has seen a lot of crises during his 21 years as a lawyer at Southwest Airlines, but nothing like the Covid-19 pandemic. Shaw and his legal team were front and center in dealing with nearly all aspects of the pandemic. Critical were multiple securities offerings, convertible notes and federal loans and grants from the federal government that allowed Southwest to raise an extraordinary $18.5 billion in capital in a period of a few months - moves that allowed the airline to avoid drastic budget cuts.

May 17, 2021 Mark Curriden

Kimberly-Clark’s Shonn Brown: ‘Using the Same System, Same Practices Yields the Same Results’

Shonn Brown was 12 years old and walking home from school when a car of white men called her the N-word and sprayed her with orange soda. Fast-forward 35 years – a Friday night last May – Brown learned that a Sonic manager threatened to call the police on her 17-year-old son and his friends – all African American – if they didn’t leave the premises.

“This is my life. This is my Black son’s life. This is our reality,” Brown wrote on Facebook. Now a year later, Brown, a highly successful commercial trial lawyer and deputy GC at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, has become one of the strongest voices for diversity and inclusion in Texas. This is her story.

May 14, 2021 Mark Curriden

‘It was like Lord of the Flies’

For Yuki Whitmire, it was the perfect storm, though at times it may have felt like the Bermuda Triangle. Last March, the securities and corporate transactional lawyer accepted a new job as Vistra Energy’s associate general counsel and corporate secretary with a start date in early April. In those few weeks in between, Covid-19 hit. But Whitmire, who has still never stepped inside her office at work, has done such an amazing job that she is the 2020 DFW Senior Counsel of the Year for a Mid-sized Legal Department. This is the story of her first year at Vistra.

May 10, 2021 Mark Curriden

Methodist’s Ashley Yen Excels in a Challenging Year for Healthcare

Ashley Yen was in kindergarten when she drew a picture of herself in the future: a stick figure of herself in a suit and glasses holding a briefcase, “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” said Yen, who is associate in-house counsel and assistant vice president at Methodist Health System. She is one of the youngest and arguably the most important in-house counsel in North Texas in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic. Because of Yen, Methodist was one of the first hospitals in DFW to administer the vaccine.

May 7, 2021 Mark Curriden

GC Priya Aiyar Gives American Airlines the Legal Advantage

American Airlines GC Priya Aiyar may be the smartest lawyer in corporate America. So say lawyers and executives who watched her in action during the pandemic. She clerked for Judge Merrick Garland and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. She's been the GC of the U.S. Treasury and a chief legal advisor at the FCC. Every bit of those smarts were needed to address the plethora of legal issues American faced during the past year.

“Priya has no ceiling,” AA Executive VP Stephen Johnson said. “If she remains in the airline industry, the industry will experience a revolution in operations and Priya will be a key reason for that evolution. She is unlike any other lawyer who has ever worked in the airline industry.”

May 5, 2021 Mark Curriden

‘Head First Into the Fire’

At 35, Ricky Torlincasi is one of the youngest GCs in the oil patch. He’s been on the job at Blackbeard Operating less than two years, but he's already helped integrate three mergers, led the acquisitions of Anadarko Basin assets from BP and ConocoPhillips’ legacy Waddell Ranch, and the divestitures of assets in Oklahoma and South Texas. Then there's the litigation he's handled.

Torlincasi's successes have him as a finalist for the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Rookie of the Year Award.

May 3, 2021 Mark Curriden

Todd Barton: A ‘Steady Hand’ at Fannie Mae

Imagine a law practice in which you serviced tens of thousands of real estate transactions annually and oversaw the litigation in thousands of cases a year. Welcome to the world of Fannie Mae Deputy GC Todd Barton and his team, who provide legal support for all properties in the U.S. that are acquired by Fannie Mae in foreclosure.
How does he do it? The answer rests in the fact that Barton is the recipient of the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Innovation. The Texas Lawbook has his story.

April 28, 2021 Mark Curriden

‘The Most Heartbreaking Situation of My Life’

No corporate in-house counsel saw her or his world turned upside down any faster or more severely because of the Covid-19 pandemic than CEC Entertainment CLO Rudy Rodriguez. The 741 Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper restaurants in 47 states were shut down within days last March, thousands of workers were furloughed and then came bankruptcy.

The situation required extraordinary legal work, strong leadership and a tender heart. Rodriguez provided it. CEC survived and is poised to thrive. And Rodriguez, as a result, is a finalist for the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department. This is his story.

April 26, 2021 Mark Curriden