Cindy Dinh was on a proverbial seesaw about going to law school when she took an intro to law class at Rice University taught by Assistant U.S. Attorney Rodolfo Ramirez.
“Though I dreaded the Socratic method, he challenged me to come from behind the books and do oral arguments for our moot court final,” Dinh said. “The issue was whether a person with limited English proficiency properly waived his Miranda rights. This was a topic that spoke to me, since I empathized with how difficult it can be for English-language learners to navigate central aspects of society, including the legal system.”
“In a way, lawyers are interpreters of legal jargon and procedure,” she said. “For this project, I spent late nights and weekends on Westlaw and poured myself into this all-consuming project. I had a hot panel and enjoyed extemporaneous speaking and answering questions on the spot. I concluded that if I was so vested in this mock case, I might as well expend the same time and energy to advocate for others in real life.”
Until then, the only lawyers in Dinh’s youth were those on TV or highway billboards.
“Judge Judy was a familiar face, appearing on TV every afternoon,” she said.
But she learned many of her skills as an attorney from her nonlawyer mother, Katherine.
“I watched her talk to customer service representatives on the phone and meet with teachers and principals at school,” Dinh said. “For every call where she disputed something, she made twice as many calls to a supervisor to compliment someone for an outstanding job. Through her, I learned the values of showing gratitude, helping others feel validated and how to document your calls and ask for a case number so that you can follow up afterwards. These are life skills that continue to help me as a lawyer.”
The daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Dinh is widely recognized as an emerging star within the corporate in-house legal community.
At age 35, she is corporate counsel for the U.S. operations of Sumitomo Corporation, a four-centuries-old Japanese global sogo shosha trading giant, where she handled multimillion-dollar M&A deals, oversaw a litigation docket of million-dollar disputes and negotiated master service agreements.
In May, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook awarded Dinh the 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year, which recognizes extraordinary achievement for lawyers under 40 who have been in-house counsel for three years or less.
“Although Cindy joined our organization in August 2022, she has already made a companywide impact to our global company of 72,642 employees,” said Sumitomo Managing Attorney Kacy Menefee, who nominated Dinh for the award. “Cindy’s efficacious work ethic and congenial personality makes her a pleasure to work with, and she easily builds strong relationships with the business units that we support.”
“There’s no question that Cindy’s in the right place, because where the rubber meets the road, she brings results,” Menefee said.
Chris Thompson, a partner at Jackson Walker who has represented Sumitomo in litigation matters, describes Dinh as “detail-oriented, thoughtful, responsive and proactive.”
“Cindy consistently navigates and manages both legal and business considerations when making decisions,” Thompson said. “Thus, she helps her internal clients pursue and achieve their overall goals of reducing risk and liability, as well as succeeding in their business goals.”
“Cindy is a very, very quick study,” he said. “When she first got involved in several active matters that I am handling, she got up to speed on the history of the case, the issues involved and the strategies we were pursuing. This enabled her to make informed and well-reasoned decisions as these cases progressed and to also leverage internal resources necessary to obtain key information for the matter.”
Dinh is a mother of two and married to a pediatric intensive care doctor. They welcomed their second child in March.
“Raising a newborn is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Dinh said. “It’s like having a difficult client who cannot properly communicate his needs and demands that you work around the clock, including weekends and holidays. But as they say with raising kids, the nights are long, but the years are short.”
Dinh describes herself as a “first-generation professional.” Her family’s immigration story is straight from the annals of American immigration success, facing extraordinary perils to escape Vietnam in a search for freedom and democracy.
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Dinh’s father was one month shy of his high school graduation when he and Dinh’s uncle left Saigon by boat in April 1975, the night before Saigon fell to North Vietnam’s forces.
“Thinking it was safer to wait out the end of the war and return home just as soon as South Vietnam pushed the communists out, they only brought enough food for three days,” Dinh told The Lawbook. “But they were adrift in the Pacific Ocean for seven days. Soon, their boat of 300 evacuees ran out of food and fuel. Nine other vessels passed by without rendering aid, until the 10th vessel, a U.S. merchant ship, picked up half of the people, separating my father and uncle.”
Dinh said her father was later transported to Guam, then to Wake Island, where he was reunited with her uncle. They were sent to Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base outside San Diego that served as a temporary refugee camp. Her father eventually settled in Houston.
After the war, Dinh’s mother and grandmother reunited with family in France for a year before moving to Texas.
Dinh’s mother was an interpreter who took care of her three children, while her father worked as an auto mechanic for the city of Houston for 27 years. Dinh and her siblings were born and raised in Houston.
Dinh attended Rice University, where she learned the “art of asking someone to coffee to conduct information interviews and learn more about the legal profession.”
“Though not an easy task to cold-call someone to ask for their time, I was a writer and editor for my high school and college newspaper and had experience meeting someone new and asking questions,” she said. “I met people who gave me a spectrum of advice, everywhere from ‘Don’t go to law school’ to ‘Go to the best law school you can get into.’ ‘Pursue that joint degree so that you’ll be well-credentialed and no one can doubt that you earned your seat at the table.’”
“By collecting these various data points, I started charting my path toward law school and public policy school and met some great mentors and cheerleaders along the way,” she said.
Dinh earned a dual degree — a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government — in May 2016. Along the way, she did an internship with the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, worked as a voter outreach coordinator with the Harris County Clerk’s Office and did clerkships with the U.S. attorney’s office in Houston and U.S. District Judge Gray Miller of the Southern District of Texas.
Susman Godfrey hired Dinh in 2017 and she moved to Mayer Brown in 2019, where she practiced litigation for three years.
During her time in private practice, she helped secure a multimillion-dollar award for an international steel manufacturer, managed all aspects of discovery, depositions and witness preparation in a products liability case involving an international pipeline company and was the lead associate in a construction law and breach of contract lawsuit.
“After returning from my first maternity leave in 2022, the once tolerable billable hours, face-time and afternoon team meetings that bled into the evenings were now strains on my schedule, so much that I only saw my son for about an hour a day,” she said. “As a senior litigation associate, I was also looking for more client interaction and autonomy to run a case, which were hard to come by when you are staffed on large cases. My network of mentors and friends helped me see the bigger picture: I have about 20-30 more years of work before retirement, and a lot can happen in those years.”
In August 2022, Dinh made the move from Big Law to in-house counsel at Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, where she is in a generalist role overseeing litigation and corporate matters.
“The soft skills that took the backburner in Big Law are now my most valuable asset as I meet with management from business units and subsidiaries every day to distill legal advice that is easy to understand, assess risks and encourage people to continue to seek legal counsel on future projects,” she said.
Founded in 1615 by a former Buddhist monk, Sumitomo’s business lines include tubular products, real estate, pet food, electronics, aerospace, mining and tires.
“As a former litigator, I am managing M&A deals and investments for the first time and have to learn how to be comfortable with the uncomfortable — and knowing when to ask my colleagues and outside counsel for help,” she said. “While it’s easy to just focus on the litigation matters that I am more familiar with, I opted to challenge myself to grow professionally and to learn something new every day.”
“Through this experience, I have developed a stronger relationship with our Energy Innovation Initiative of Americas business unit, which was recently established in 2021 to focus on next-generation, carbon-free initiatives, including hydrogen, ammonium and sustainable aviation fuel,” she said. “Renewable energy is booming, and our legal department is involved at the beginning of most investments at the nondisclosure agreement and memorandum of understanding stages all the way to financial investment decision.”
Menefee said Dinh “showed initiative early on” when she was assigned a long-term project to draft a code of business conduct for Sumitomo’s U.S. subsidiaries, which total more than 345 entities.
“Cindy exceeded expectations by recommending new sections, editing existing language to make it reader-friendly, adding graphics, preparing board resolutions and training materials and, on her own, eliciting feedback across company stakeholders whom she met for the first time because of this project,” Menefee said. “Noticing the quality of her work, the compliance officer approved the code for use companywide at all subsidiaries and used the code as a template to revise our parent company’s code — making her mark on a legacy document for Sumitomo Corporation’s largest global subsidiary.”
Earlier this year, Dinh helped negotiate, sign and close a deal to invest in Louisiana Green Fuels LLC, a power plant that will convert woody biomass to sustainable aviation fuel in rural Louisiana. Sumitomo is also anchoring a Japanese-based investment consortium aimed at funding the majority of development capital needed to carry the project to final investment decision and construction in early 2025.
“I look forward to seeing how these new investments develop since most of these nascent projects are expected to come online in the next five to 10 years,” she said. “It is an exciting time to be part of the team investing in cutting-edge, low-carbon solutions, leading to a more sustainable future.”
“On any given day, I may have meetings with the three other members of the legal team in Houston to talk through projects, discuss how to distribute our quarterly corporate social responsibility donations on our 100SEED committee to schools and nonprofit organizations in our community, or lead meetings with various business units to discuss legal risks inherent with a proposed multimillion dollar transaction,” Dinh said. “I leave feeling validated that the legal advice I rendered was well-received, considered and appreciated.”
Geraldine Young, an antitrust litigation partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, said Dinh has become a “true adviser and confidant to the business teams” at Sumitomo.
“Cindy is thoughtful, listens and respects the views of her colleagues, including and especially nonlawyers, and provides the necessary legal guidance and advice in a collaborative manner,” Young said. “Since joining Sumitomo, she has tackled a tremendous learning curve in getting to know all aspects of their business, teams, culture, and deals and projects, which is a hallmark of any good lawyer: understanding every aspect of your clients to better serve them.”
As an “avid foodie,” Dinh started a monthly “lunch bunch” group where she and her colleagues try a new or ethnic restaurant around the office.
“I love showcasing what our city has to offer to colleagues who recently moved from Tokyo to Houston or who are visiting from another office,” she said.
Dinh said Sumitomo encourages community involvement by offering three paid days off to volunteer.
“You can catch me reading to elementary schools on law day, speaking to students on career day or judging a mock trial competition,” she said. “The Houston Young Lawyers Association asked me to speak on a panel to law students to demystify the judicial clerkship application process, which I gladly accepted despite being nine months pregnant at the time.”
Young said that Dinh “is a true promoter of diversity and inclusion, through her actions, not just her words.”
“She has done so much to uplift others,” Young said. “As just one example, through her in-house role, she has gone out of her way to promote and advocate for me, as an Asian American female litigation partner.”
Dinh said law firms and corporate legal departments must identify bias when addressing diversity and inclusion.
“For the first time in my career, when I joined Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, I was not the only woman, nor the only Asian American in a legal department,” she said. “It was like a mental load was taken off of my shoulders, since I was no longer the lone representative for an entire demographic.”
“Companies can prevent tokenism by ensuring more than one person is represented in a group,” Dinh said. “Boardrooms and courtrooms have a long way to go, but the focus should not only be at the hiring stage but also at the retention and promotion stages so that others coming up the ladder feel like they belong, are valued and can succeed in the organization.”