Tonja De Sloover’s first courtroom appearance came a month after she graduated from the University of Iowa College of Law in 2002 and before she had passed the bar exam. A senior associate at then-Fulbright & Jaworski asked De Sloover to help handle a pro bono matter in Harris County.
Their clients were a husband and wife who had saved $30,000 from his VCR repair work over several years so that they could move their manufactured home to a better school district for their young daughter.
“This family saved everything they had to do this for their daughter,” De Sloover said. “The woman who owned the home-moving business took their money, but literally dumped their home on the side of the road and refused to pay them back. She was an evil woman.”
Fulbright – now Norton Rose Fulbright – represented the couple for free and sued the business.
“The morning of the trial, we told the lawyers for the other side that I didn’t have my law license yet and asked if they minded,” De Sloover said. “They laughed a bit and said they didn’t mind.”
Those defense attorneys got more than they bargained for from the rookie lawyer. De Sloover argued the key pretrial issues, including opposing the defense lawyers’ efforts to exclude all of the witnesses for the plaintiffs and a dispute over the charge to the jury. The judge ruled in favor of De Sloover’s arguments and the plaintiffs eventually won the case and got their $30,000 back after the Fulbright lawyers enforced a lien against the mover’s property.
“The family was so happy,” she said. “I realized then that I made the right choice to become a trial lawyer.”
Sixteen years later, De Sloover is the assistant general counsel and head of litigation at Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, one of the largest oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S.
Despite being only 41, she is in charge of some of the biggest and most complex corporate lawsuits pending in the U.S. court system.
The courtroom successes she has already scored are getting noticed.
TX GC Forum Award
This Thursday, the Texas General Counsel Forum is honoring De Sloover with its prestigious Magna Stella Award for Major Litigation at the organization’s annual meeting in Austin.
“Tonja is one of the smartest lawyers I know,” ETP General Counsel Tom Mason told The Texas Lawbook in an interview earlier this year. “She has extraordinary judgment – both of people and situations and in the courtroom.”
Houston trial attorney Paul Yetter, who nominated De Sloover for the award, said she is one of the “smartest, [most] strategic” litigators he has ever met.
“I am sure that many opponents – including a lot of trial lawyers – have misjudged Tonja and they came to regret that mistake,” said Yetter, who is the managing partner of Yetter Coleman in Houston. “Tonja is tough as nails. She has a maturity and understanding of litigation that is way beyond her years.
“Even in the biggest cases and the most intensive pressure, Tonja is calm and focused, which is truly critical to successful high-stakes litigation,” he said.
New Face of Business Litigation
Legal industry insiders say De Sloover is one of the new faces of high-stakes business litigation – tough, aggressive, brilliantly strategic and more than willing to use the court system to accomplish her company’s objectives and enforce its rights. Lawyers who worked with and against De Sloover say she has the passion and competitiveness of Joe Jamail, the patience and tactical skills of Carol Dinkins and the critical thinking and storytelling abilities of David Beck.
But corporate law analysts also say that De Sloover is the perfect role model for highly successful women in the practice of law today.
A mother of three, De Sloover’s Facebook pages are filled with adorable family photos – she and the children trick-or-treating, the family posing with the Easter Bunny and nights at Minute Maid Park watching the Houston Astros.
“Tonja is young and attractive and a good, kindhearted person and a doting mother, but do not be deceived, she is a litigation warrior,” said Dallas trial lawyer Mike Lynn of Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst.
“So many lawyers are so scared of losing in court that it paralyzes them,” said Lynn, who represents ETP in various matters. “Tonja is absolutely unafraid to take a case to trial. In fact, she loves being in battle and she loves trials. She is fearless. She is the ideal client for a trial lawyer.”
For her part, De Sloover credits her bosses, including Mason, and her outside counsel at multiple law firms for the successes she’s achieved.
“I am conservatively aggressive and I have no fear of going to trial,” she told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview this week. “I hate losing, but I think there are lawyers at other companies who are afraid of going to trial because they are afraid that they will lose their job if they lose the case.
“I can operate without such fear because I have the full support of Tom and the company’s leadership,” she said.
During the past two years, De Sloover has guided ETP, a $40 billion company with nearly 30,000 employees, through some of the largest and highest-profile corporate lawsuits pending in the U.S. courts. The GC Forum, in recognizing De Sloover for the Magna Stella, highlighted several major litigation victories she has achieved, including:
• She led the litigation team that defeated a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit brought by competitor Williams Inc. over an aborted $33 billion merger deal that was canceled when it was learned that assets would not be tax-free, which was a key condition of the transaction.
• She is currently guiding ETP’s legal battle in Delaware Chancery Court against Williams, which claims that ETP owes it $410 millions in an M&A deal break up fee. The case is currently in discovery.
• She oversaw the successful defeat of a major securities class action lawsuit earlier this year brought by ETP “unit holders” seeking to cancel a private placement, which would have cost the pipeline company an estimated $500 million.
• She has taken a hands-on role in ETP’s nine-figure lawsuit against rival Enterprise Products Partners of Houston. ETP claims that Enterprise violated their partnership to build a pipeline from Oklahoma to Houston and instead did a deal with a competitor. ETP originally scored a $500 million jury verdict against Enterprise. It was reversed on appeal and is now pending before the Texas Supreme Court.
• Finally, she has successfully guided ETP through a highly sensitive, high-stakes, high-profile environmental legal battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is still pending. Last year, ETP sued environmental groups for inciting riots and environmental terrorism.
“Tonja is no passive manager of litigation and outside counsel,” Lynn said. “Even though she supervises a staggering volume of lawsuits, Tonja is actively involved in just about every major case and she wants to be a part of the strategy decisions.”
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.
Growing Up in Iowa
Tonja De Sloover was born in Norway, Iowa (pop. 450), which is 17 miles southwest of Cedar Rapids. Her mother and father met in Shanghai, where her dad served in the U.S. Air Force doing airplane maintenance and her mother worked at the U.S. Embassy. They married and moved to Iowa, where he had been raised.
Her dad worked on production equipment, while her mother worked in information technology. De Sloover is the youngest of three daughters – each was born about 18 months apart.
“We are frequently mistaken as triplets all the time,” she said.
“Growing up in Iowa was wonderfully simple, nice and uncomplicated,” she said. “Iowans are great, hard-working people. I have those values instilled in me.”
De Sloover pitched for her high school softball team and also played volleyball.
“I love sports and I’m very competitive,” she said.
The only lawyer in De Sloover’s family was her grandfather, who was a military attorney in Shanghai.
“I probably watched too many episodes of LA Law, but I thought the idea of being a lawyer seemed fun,” she said.
A partner at Fulbright recruited De Sloover to join the firm’s Houston office after law school.
First Jury Trial
Two years after joining the firm, De Sloover second-chaired her first jury trial, though the partner leading the accounting malpractice case allowed her to do opening statements and handle the questioning of several main witnesses.
“I remember telling the jury that this was my first trial and all the women on the jury smiled and thought that was so sweet,” she said.
The four-day trial ended with the jury returning with a verdict after only a couple hours, declaring that De Sloover’s client was only minimally liable and ordered to pay only $10,000 – far short of the damages the plaintiff sought.
“The client was so happy and I knew again that I had made the right choice to be a trial lawyer,” she said. “I loved being a lawyer at Fulbright. The firm promoted me to partner and I truly thought I would never leave.”
But then ETP called in 2013 and it was a challenge she couldn’t pass up.
“I was so naïve when I took this job,” she said. “I had no idea what the head of litigation did and no idea the breadth of the work.”
Beyond the major cases already mentioned, De Sloover also oversees a significant docket of litigation involving vehicle accidents, pipeline ruptures and contract disputes across the country.
“I like to be actively involved in our cases and I try to attend most of the important depositions and hearings in person,” she said. “I’m very hands-on. I want to be in the weeds in order to evaluate the risks. I want to see the credibility of the witness. And I’m a note-passer. If I’m there in court, I believe I should contribute.”
Vinson & Elkins partner Michael Holmes, who works with De Sloover on the Williams litigation, said she “jumps right in the fray” and “meaningfully contributes” to litigation.
“Tonja got into the weeds, reviewing key motions, deposition transcripts and expert reports and attending the deposition and trial planning sessions,” Holmes said. “Tonja is a legitimate trial lawyer who contributes on the front lines.”
De Sloover said that one of the most important decisions she makes is putting together the team of outside lawyers to handle the individual cases.
‘Loyal to Our Law Firms’
“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.”
The go-to law firms for De Sloover and ETP include Vinson & Elkins, Norton Rose Fulbright, Yetter Coleman and Lynn Pinker.
“I prefer to use Texas-based lawyers because they tend to know our business and they know our people,” she said. “We are a fast-moving, fast-growing company, but we operate like a smaller company because we avoid a lot of bureaucracy.”
De Sloover said she avoids law firm rankings, except in situations where there is litigation in an unknown geographic area.
“We get so many glossy files from law firms pitching us work and they are filled with rankings that simply don’t matter to me or include a lawyer who I later discover hasn’t had a jury trial in five or 10 years,” she said. “I want to hear about the recent results of individual lawyers in cases that are similar to ours.”
De Sloover said the biggest successes on the job are those no one ever hears about.
“Our biggest wins and my best days are when we actually prevent disputes or litigation by making sure the business is operating properly,” she said. “While I love being in court and being in trial, my number one job is to limit and manage risk.”