Once a year, the Association of Corporate Counsel recognize 10 in-house lawyers in their 30s for their extraordinary achievements and success.
The global competition from the 45,000-member ACC is fierce. The organization received more than 195 nominations worldwide. No one from a North Texas corporate legal department had ever won the award.
Now, the Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter of ACC can boast that two of its members have received the prestigious honor.
J. C. Penney Senior Counsel April Goff and Pinnacle Group General Counsel Erin Stewart are two of the recipients of the “Top 10 30-Somethings” awards for 2019.
The achievement is not the only news for Goff this week. Wednesday is her last day at J. C. Penney, as she starts Thursday in the Dallas office of Perkins Coie as a partner in the firm’s employee benefits and executive compensation practice.
Goff, who is on the ACC-DFW board of directors, has been a lawyer in the J. C. Penney legal department for more than three years. She was the sole lawyer at JCP handling ERISA and employment benefits, including the retailer’s $3.4 billion pension plan and $2.8 billion 401(k) program.
“Within weeks of moving in-house at J. C. Penney Corporation, Goff jumped into several projects that saved the company millions of dollars,” ACC said in honoring Goff. “When she arrived at JCPenney, Goff discovered unnecessarily complicated employee benefits policies and procedures — all at high costs to a company with over 100,000 employees.
“Goff reviewed and simplified hundreds of personnel policies and developed long-term plans to minimize benefit plan costs,” ACC officials said. “Her goal was to partner with the business stakeholders to modernize and streamline plans while providing better, more attractive benefits to the employees at a cheaper price to the company.”
During her three years at JCP, Goff renegotiated more than $700 million in contracts with vendors related to employee medical, dental and other benefits. She spearheaded a voluntary early retirement program with cost-savings of more than $30 million, and she led a multi-department pension plan de-risking strategy that saved $16.7 million in just over a one-year period with no outside counsel assistance.
Born in Arlington and raised in Grand Prairie, Goff was the first person in her family to go to college. In fact, she went to college at 16, graduated with a business degree at 18, received her MBA from Baylor University at 20 and her law degree from St. Thomas School of Law in Miami at 23.
After stints at Holland & Knight, Sonnenschein and Seyfarth Shaw, Goff moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to be senior counsel at Warner, Norcross & Judd. In May 2016, she joined JCP’s legal department.
“My best days at J. C. Penney have been partnering with strategic stakeholders to offer employees better benefits at lower prices,” Goff told The Texas Lawbook in an interview Tuesday. “The biggest challenge has been resources.
“I have loved the people here and the work has been incredibly sophisticated,” she said.
Goff also played a vital role in the retailer’s cybersecurity and data privacy protection efforts. She became a certified information privacy professional and led a cross-functional team of more than 50 employees and vendors to create a more robust cybersecurity policy and incident response protocol.
Pinnacle’s Erin Stewart
A 2004 graduate of Columbia Law School, Erin Stewart practiced commercial litigation for 19 months at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman in New York.
In 2007, Stewart joined the legal department at the University of North Texas, where she served as assistant general counsel and handled everything from contracts and property leases to employment, trademark and copyright matters.
In February 2012, Dallas-based workforce staffing and management services company Pinnacle Group hired Stewart as its associate general counsel over its employment and intellectual property litigation matters.
Pinnacle promoted Stewart to general counsel and vice president of human resources in October 2014. More details on Erin Stewart and her successes will come in a future article.