Stephanie Zapata Moore always thought she was first and only lawyer in her family.
Then 10 years ago, her uncle found an old but well-preserved document that he gave to Moore. It was a law diploma with her great uncle’s name on it dated June 7, 1929. It was signed by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Lyndon Baines Johnson aboard Air Force One.
“I was struck by the history of it,” she says. “My mom had it framed and gave it to me as a Christmas present.”
Moore is the general counsel of Vistra Energy, a Dallas-based company which has multiple subsidiaries including TXU Energy and Luminant.
During the past year, Moore has led efforts to integrate the legal and compliance teams and matters from Houston-based Dynegy, which Vistra Energy acquired in 2018. She oversaw the company’s $475 million purchase of Ambit Energy and the $500 million acquisition of Crius Energy Trust. In June, Vistra did a $1 billion private securities offering. She and her team last year convinced the federal government to dismiss its case against Luminant regarding the Martin Lake Power Plant after six years of heated litigation.
“We’ve had a busy few years,” Moore says. “I love being a lawyer. I tried being a school teacher, as a student teacher, and that was much harder. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was 10.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook has selected Moore as the 2019 DFW General Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department.
Moore and other finalists will be honored at the 2019 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards ceremony Jan. 30 at the George W. Bush Institute.
“Stephanie is a well-rounded lawyer who manages the challenges of different legal issues seamlessly,” says Sidley Austin partner Yvette Ostolaza, who nominated Moore for the award. “She is also a great leader who has assembled a great team.”
Gibson Dunn partner Mike Raiff says Moore provides the “right mix” of supervision, delegation, mentorship and accountability within the Vistra legal department.
“She has such a deep knowledge of both the business side and legal side of the industry that she is constantly seeing around corners and finding creative ways to solve problems,” Raiff says.
Other lawyers agree.
“I tried being a school teacher, as a student teacher, and that was much harder. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was 10.”
“Stephanie is a natural leader,” says Stephen Gidiere, a partner at Balch & Bingham. “I’ve been in the trenches with her for nearly 10 years on some incredibly complex and challenging matters – from trial court in West Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court in D.C. She never shrinks from a challenge, and she inspires others to do their best.”
To escape from the demands of the job, Moore has run marathons throughout the country, from New York to Houston to North Dakota.
“Fargo is very flat and a great place to hold a race at the right times of the year,” she says.
Moore’s parents are Mexican-American. Her mother was a school teacher. Her father was career Army, which meant the family moved around quite a bit, including three years in Germany.
“This led to my family being extremely close – in fact my parents, the three siblings and seven grandchildren all live within a five-mile radius in Dallas now,” she says. “We still get together at least once a week for a family dinner.”
Moore has four children – three daughters and one son, ages ranging from six to 15
“I have a wonderful, supportive husband who left professional life seven years ago to be a full-time dad, which I love my kids – especially the girls – to see and which enabled me to continue pursuing my professional aspirations in a way that would not have been possible if he hadn’t made this choice for the benefit of our family,” she says.
“We live in daily chaos, but we wouldn’t trade it for the world,” she says.
Moore says she was destined to be an attorney.
“My parents told me growing up that I was a great arguer and should pursue the law,” she says. “That took hold at a young age.”
Moore went to high school in Tampa, where they had a teen court system that operated in the evenings for juvenile offenders. Students were selected to be jurors and help the prosecution and defense. She played all three roles.
For college, Moore went to Duke University in 1991. She is a diehard Blue Devil, which she quickly reminded me “won back-to-back championships” in 1991 and 1992.
Moore chose the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary, which awarded her a Graduate Research Fellowship, helping her pay for all three years.
“When I was considering offers, I still remember a talk with my dad who said, ‘You know, they really want you to go to W&M. You will be a person there and not just a number or another student,’” she says. “That stuck with me and was how I felt the law school treated me.”
No Texas law firms recruited at William & Mary, and Moore didn’t want to practice in Washington, D.C., Atlanta or Richmond.
“I had decided that I wanted to go to a big city with sophisticated legal work but also a low cost of living and a relatively nice climate.,” she says.
Because her father had grown up in Dallas and she had “ton of extended family” in North Texas, Moore believed DFW would a good fit for her.
“I got the list of all of the NALP [National Association for Law Placement] firms in Dallas and started a letter-writing campaign,” she says.
One law firm, Gardere, wrote back. Moore clerked there during the summer of her second year and then started as an associate in 1998. She practiced one year in litigation and then jumped to the private securities and transactional practice.
“I felt that year of litigation helped me to be a better contract drafter and has definitely proven helpful as I have expanded my in-house responsibilities over the years,” she says. “I was so lucky to find Gardere. They were very good to me and I learned a lot at the firm.”
Moore started considering the world of in-house counsel in 2005. For seven years, she worked for multiple clients in a wide array of industries.
“The opportunity to learn one business and work for one client was attractive, as well as the prospect of a more predictable schedule given that I had a young baby at the time,” she says.
Despite practicing in Texas, Moore had done no work for energy clients while at Gardere. Even so, her interviews at TXU went well, and she thought the power company “was a better fit for my skills and that the culture of the legal department felt more entrepreneurial in that we were building our own department from the ground up.”
The past 14 years have been quite a ride for Moore.
Eighteen months after she joined the publicly traded company, a group of private equity firms bought TXU Energy and its companion companies, Oncor and Luminant, for $45 billion in the largest leveraged buyout in U.S. history. The new parent company was called Energy Future Holdings.
Moore not only survived, she thrived. In response, management gave her more and more duties and eventually she became the general counsel of Luminant, according to lawyers who worked with her.
“Stephanie engenders the trust of business leaders and that invariably produces better results.,” says Rob Walters, a partner at Gibson Dunn who was the first general counsel at EFH. “Simply put, she makes people better. She is a rare talent.”
In 2014, as Luminant’s general counsel, Moore led a litigation team in a major environmental case. The Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project sued the energy company claiming that its Big Brown Power Plant in Fairfield, Texas, was emitting more soot and other contaminants than the law allows.
Moore put together the trial team, which included Bill Dawson and Mike Raiff from Gibson Dunn in Dallas and EFH head of litigation Dan Kelly.
In February 2014, U.S. District Judge Walter Smith conducted a three-day trial in Waco.
“I worked on trial strategy, helped coordinate the employees who were witnesses, kept the management team updated and sat through the trial,” she says.
In a sweeping decision favoring EFH, Judge Smith found that the lawsuit was “frivolous, unreasonable and groundless.” The judge ordered the plaintiffs to pay $6.4 million to EFH in lawyer fees.
In December 2014, Moore and Kelly negotiated a settlement agreement with the Sierra Club in which the environmental organization agreed to drop its appeal in the Big Brown Power Plant case and drop their lawsuits in a handful of other cases.
That same year, Luminant’s parent company, EFH, filed for bankruptcy, seeking to restructure its debt. Fortunately for Moore, she was able to stay focused on Luminant’s normal work, with a few exceptions.
“Fortunately, my role in was minimal,” she says. “We had to be sure that all of our contracts would continue and that work would be performed.”
As part of the restructuring, the bankruptcy court approved a plan to split EFH. A new parent company called Vistra Energy was created with two subsidiaries, Luminant and TXU Energy.
Lawyers who were involved in the restructuring say that Moore was the perfect choice to the first general counsel of the new company.
“Stephanie knows that building a strong team – inside and outside the company – is critical to winning major complex matters,” says Gidiere. “Stephanie expects and requires team work from everyone – outside counsel, different law firms and her own in-house team. She will not tolerate in-fighting or ego trips.”
She runs a legal department that includes about two-dozen attorneys and more than two-dozen supporting staff, which includes their compliance group.
“We’ve made some interesting changes, including we have gone to the no offices, open concept,” she says. “We were collaborative before, but now we are all very hands-on and even more collaborative.”
Her biggest successes during the past three years, she says, were taking Vistra Energy public and being at the New York Stock Exchange to be part of the group that rang the opening bell.
“That was very exciting,” she says.
The next biggest achievement, she says, was closing Vistra’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Dynegy.
Moore says she and her team like having long-term relationships with outside counsel.
“We are very hands-on with all of our matters, which does not work for every outside counsel,” she says. “Most of our relationships with firms have evolved over many years, but we are always looking to develop additional bench and establish new relationships, especially as we have quickly expanded our footprint beyond Texas over the last 2 years.”