Finalist: Business Litigation of the Year
When Tom Mason started representing Energy Transfer Equity, the Dallas-based pipeline company employed 50 people and had tens of millions of dollars in revenues.
Two decades later, Mason is ETE’s general counsel and executive vice president, but the company has changed a lot. ETE and its affiliated business, Energy Transfer Partners, employ 30,000 people, including more than 70 people just in Mason’s legal department. The company owns and operates 71,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines, has a market cap of $20 billion and annual revenues of $37 billion.
“I saw a company that seemed interesting and exciting and I just jumped on board,” he says.
While Mason is a corporate lawyer with expertise in securities offerings, IPOs and master limited partnerships, he and his head of litigation, Tonja De Sloover, have been spending a lot of time in the courtroom the past two years.
They’ve battled in the Delaware courts with Oklahoma-based Williams Companies over the failed $33 billion merger of the two pipeline companies. The company has spent a lot of time in federal court in North Dakota battling environmental groups over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Native American groups sued Energy Transfer to stop construction of the pipeline. In August, the company sued environmental groups for inciting riots and environmental terrorism.
ETP is also fighting in the Texas appellate courts to restore a $535 million jury verdict against a competitor over an alleged pipeline joint venture that unraveled.
“I call my job a unicorn because it is so amazing,” De Sloover says. “The litigation philosophy is simple: be conservative but be aggressive. We definitely do not back down, especially when we think we are right.
“We are the plaintiff in several cases,” she says. “It’s much more fun being the plaintiff than the defendant.”
ETE’s legal team, led by Mason and De Sloover, are finalist for the 2017 Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook will honor the finalists and announce the winners at the annual awards event on Jan. 25.
Interestingly, Mason and De Sloover were both born in small towns in Iowa – albeit 200 miles and 20 years apart. Mason went to law school at UT in Austin, while De Sloover received her law degree at the University of Iowa. Mason became a partner at V&E; De Sloover became a partner at Fulbright & Jaworski.
“I thought I would be at Fulbright until I retired, but then this position came open,” De Sloover says. “I was told that I would never get it because I had no in-house experience.”
But she did get the job and has led the ETP litigation department since.
“Tonja is exceptionally smart and she has an even keel and great judgment,” Mason says. “We are conservatively aggressive. Sometimes, there are principles involved that are more important than money.”
Mike Lynn, a founding partner at Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst who nominated ETP for the award, said De Sloover provides “steady steerage and leadership” for the company’s litigation.
“The company has been no stranger to controversy and courtrooms,” Lynn wrote in the nomination. “De Sloover is not just a passive manager of litigation and outside counsel. Though tasked with supervising a staggering volume of lawsuits, including many high-stakes matters, De Sloover contributes actively to strategy decisions every day.”
Lynn pointed to a $200 million lawsuit against ETP in South Texas in which De Sloover developed “an ingenious tactic” designed to create internal divisions between the two plaintiffs in the case.
“No one on the outside legal team had thought of the idea before, but it worked, ultimately unraveling the other side’s case and resulted in a very favorable outcome for the company,” Lynn said.
De Sloover says ETP has scores of lawsuits pending at any given time.
“I’m very hands-on,” she says. “It’s hard to evaluate risk if you are not there. I feel that I need to go to depositions and trials. I want to be in the weeds in order to evaluate the risks.”
ETP tapped Lynn to prosecute the pipeline company’s case against Enterprise Products, which is now on appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. The company has long-time outside counsel Vinson & Elkins, led by Michael Holmes and John Wander, to lead its case against Williams Companies. And Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher is handling the lawsuits in North Dakota.
“We have a handful of core law firms that we know and trust,” De Sloover says. “We don’t wander outside that group often. We are loyal to our law firms, as long as they are loyal to us.”
Mason agrees.
“We pick outside counsel based on our needs and their expertise,” Mason says. “We pick the horse that we think will win the race.”