Corban Addison’s Wastelands Gives Scoop Behind Pork Producer Nuisance Trials

A new legal thriller out this month details the story of some Texas plaintiff’s lawyers who took on the pork industry's most powerful player, a formidable opponent that provoked death threats, had the legal team followed and even changed some laws in the middle of the five-year nuisance litigation that resulted in five jury verdicts totaling hundreds-of-millions. The Lawbook sat down with Wastelands author Corban Addison Thursday when his book tour brought him to Dallas.

June 13, 2022 Natalie Posgate

Schlumberger CLO Dianne Ralston is 2022 Houston General Counsel of the Year

Dianne Ralston had no lawyers in her immediate family and her father, a petroleum engineer, had been deposed a few times and had no fondness for the legal profession. But Ralston found law fascinating. Today, she is the chief legal officer at Schlumberger NV, where she oversees a team of 400 lawyers and compliance professionals operating in 60 countries. During the past two years, Ralston onboarded four new corporate directors, revamped and updated the global corporation’s enterprise risk management processes and dramatically reorganized her legal and compliance teams. ACC Houston and The Lawbook named her the 2022 Houston GC of the Year for a Large Legal Department.

Photo: Sharon Ferranti

June 2, 2022 Mark Curriden

Forget Goats, Oasis GC Niko Lorentzatos is ‘The Buffalo’

Nickolas Lorentzatos faced 1,003 days of trials and tribulations and survived. The Oasis Petroleum general counsel had a tumultuous 33 months. There were the deaths of his father and mother. There was the Covid-19 pandemic and the crash of oil prices, which resulted in Oasis filing for bankruptcy. Lorentzatos in 2021 led a series of M&A deals, which included two $6 billion mergers.

“This time period pushed everyone to their limits and beyond, but the Oasis team answered the call time and again," Lorentzatos told The Texas Lawbook. "I have never seen anything like it before and probably never will again." The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Lawbook named Lorentzatos the 2022 Houston General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.

May 31, 2022 Mark Curriden

Channeling Struggles to Create Opportunity

Though my parents believed that conformance was the best way to achieve success, my South Korean heritage was more important than full assimilation in shaping my path to becoming a lawyer.

May 25, 2022 Sang M. Shin

William Turcotte’s Big Year: Bankruptcy, Two Major Mergers, a Pandemic, Marriage and a Cowboy’s Common Sense

Growing up the son of a South Texas rancher and educator, William Turcotte learned about facing tough times, long days of manual labor and the importance of a great education. Turcotte needed those principles the past two years as the general counsel at Noble Corporation. In a matter of months, he led the offshore drilling contractor in and out of bankruptcy, eliminating $3.4 billion in bond debt. Only weeks after emerging from Chapter 11, Noble acquired Pacific Drilling. In November 2021, Turcotte and Noble were at it again, closing a $3.13 billion all-stock merger with Maersk Drilling.

“The joke was ‘You can always sleep when you’re dead,’” Turcotte told The Texas Lawbook. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Turcotte as one of two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.

May 19, 2022 Mark Curriden

2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement: Archrock GC Stephanie Hildebrandt

For three decades, Stephanie Hildebrandt has been general counsel in some of the biggest and complicated civil lawsuits and M&A transactions in Texas. She's been the GC at Archrock, a Houston-based provider of natural gas contract compression services, where she led the company’s $1 billion take-private transaction of Archrock Partners. Hildebrandt spent more than a decade as general counsel at Enterprise Products, where she supervised three huge acquisitions for the company, including the $4.4 billion merger with Oiltanking Partners, the 2011 purchase of Duncan Energy for $2.4 billion and the 2009 acquisition of Teppco Partners for $3.3 billion.

This Thursday evening, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are honoring Hildebrandt with the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.

May 18, 2022 Mark Curriden

Phillips 66 Team Used 11 p.m. Nightly Calls and Creative Legal Work to Complete $3.4B Transaction

Each night at 11 p.m. for nearly a year, Robert Task, Julie Pradel and Maine Goodfellow were on the phone discussing the problems they faced, the challenges lying ahead and the successes achieved that day. The three senior-level in-house counsel at Phillips 66 spent hundreds and hundreds of hours negotiating the terms, handling due diligence, doing the paperwork and getting the necessary approvals to push Phillips 66’s $3.4 billion acquisition of its limited partner, Phillips 66 Partners, over the finish line. Task, Pradel and Goodfellow faced multiple headwinds: stresses from the lingering pandemic, fluctuating oil and gas prices, rising interest rates, a tumultuous global economic environment and wild swings in stock prices. But they got the deal done and it is a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Transaction of the Year.

May 17, 2022 Mark Curriden

Medical Informatics Associate GC Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett Helps ‘Save Lives Bit by Bit’

Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett was nine when her grandfather needed a heart transplant. She was there when doctors used an artificial heart machine to keep him alive while he waited his turn on the transplant list. “I couldn’t believe how this one piece of technology was not only keeping him alive, but vastly improved his quality of life,” she said. “All those experiences I lived through with him led me to end up where I am today, working for a healthcare-technology company that creates software to make the jobs of healthcare professionals more efficient and accurate, in order to save more lives.”

Twenty-five years later, Desgranges-Ellett is the associate general counsel and compliance officer at Medical Informatics Corp., a healthcare-technology company where she helped create and implement the company’s first contract-management system, led the company’s internal-ethics initiative and mentoring program and is designing the formal return-to-work policies and procedures. She is also a finalist for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.

May 17, 2022 Mark Curriden

Phillips 66’s Kathleen Bertolatus: Pro Bono ‘Can Truly Change the Lives of Our Clients’

Seven weeks ago, a 15-year-old West African who had never been in an airplane before and who speaks very little English walked through the international arrival terminal at Bush International Airport with three bags containing everything he owned. The teen’s mother, her body stricken with cancer and worn from years of being beaten by male relatives in her homeland, raced to hug her son after nearly four years and 6,000 miles of separation.

The reunion was the result of four long years of legal work by Phillips 66 Senior Counsel Kathleen Bertolatus, who represented the mother in a series of immigration proceedings that resulted in the mother obtaining asylum and being reunited with her teenaged daughter after both faced forced female genital mutilation by their family and certain death if they didn’t comply. That was in 2019. On March 30 of this year, the great pro bono legal work of Bertolatus allowed mother, son and daughter to be together and to be safe.

May 16, 2022 Mark Curriden

Registered Series in Texas LLCs are Almost Here

On June 1 amendments to the Texas Business Organizations Code adopted in the 2021 Texas Legislature will become effective. This article highlights how one of those amendments can be expected to bring better transparency and usefulness for series of Texas limited liability companies.

May 3, 2022 Daryl Robertson