© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
Finalist: General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department
By Mark Curriden
(Jan. 22) – Darryl Marsch remembers his first trial. He was the defense lawyer in a DWI case.
“I asked the key witness a critical question about how a breathalyzer worked and the expert could not answer,” he says. “We got an acquittal.”
Keep in mind, Marsch was only 16 and the case was part of his high school mock trial course.
“But I got the bug from it and knew I wanted to be a lawyer,” he says. “I also got a little bit of inside help from my mom’s divorce lawyer in preparing for the argument.”
Three decades later, Marsch is the general counsel of one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the world, Dallas-based Wingstop, a position he assumed in July 2016.
During his first 19 months on the job, Marsch has guided deals to open scores of new stores around the world. He handled the legal agreements that paved the way for Wingstop to offer voice-activated ordering with menu item customization through Amazon’s Alexa.
Most importantly, he oversaw Wingstop’s conversion to becoming a fully independent publicly-traded company with its own independent board of directors.
“March 14, 2017 was my best day on the job because we were finally standing on our own as a company,” he says. “It also required a lot of corporate governance work, which took months to complete. I had been working on the transition since I started in July 2016.”
Haynes and Boone partner Deborah Coldwell cited Marsch’s “frenetic pace” when she nominated him for the Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
“Darryl’s ability to efficiently and successfully navigate a broad range of legal issues has helped the company, which has more than 1,000 restaurants worldwide and has grown its domestic same store sales for 13 consecutive years,” Coldwell wrote in the nomination. “In any given week, Marsch’s legal duties might range from handling internal employment matters to helping oversee international expansion and the launching of delivery and online ordering services.”
The work has helped make Marsch a finalist in the 2017 Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards, sponsored by The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook. He and the other finalists will be honored—and winners announced —at a ceremony on Thursday, Jan. 25, at the Bush Institute.
Marsch was born in New Braunfels, Texas. His mother was in retail. His father was an electrician at Honeywell.
While he was in college at the University of Texas in 1986, Marsch was awarded a one-year externship with Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sam Houston Clinton. While interning, the court heard the habeas appeal of musician David Crosby, who had been convicted of drug possession.
“I found the cases fascinating and it further influenced me to become a lawyer,” he says.
In December 1987, Marsch was awarded a six-month internship established by former Chief Justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote speeches for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, witnessed 60 hours of Supreme Court oral arguments and played basketball with law clerks at the Supreme Court’s gym.
Most importantly, he met a woman who was a librarian at the Supreme Court. They’ve now been married for 25 years.
After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in 1991, Marsch joined the Washington, D.C. office of Jones Day.
“A bunch of the Supreme Court law clerks told me they were going to work at Jones Day and I decided that’s where I wanted to go,” he says. “Jones Day is a wonderful place to be a sponge and absorb.”
In 1998, he joined the corporate legal department at R.J. Reynolds, which was implementing what was known as the “Master Settlement Agreement,” which was a $240 billion global court-approved settlement agreement between the tobacco companies and 46 state attorneys general regarding the sale of cigarettes. In 2004, Marsch worked on Reynold’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Brown & Williamson Tobacco.
Executives at Krispy Kreme came calling in 2007. Marsch was hired as the company’s assistant general counsel and then promoted to GC.
“Krispy Kreme was in dire straits,” he says. “The SEC and U.S. Attorney were investigating allegations of securities fraud and there were several lawsuits pending.”
With Marsch leading the legal efforts, the company settled favorably with the SEC without paying a fine. Federal prosecutors ended their investigation without bringing charges. All the lawsuits were resolved.
“We showed Krispy Kreme was a new company with new, much stronger corporate compliance and governance programs,” he says. “We showed we had built a strong culture of compliance.
“I must say it was quite a pleasure to get a call from Wingstop, where everything was going very well,” he says. “It was almost too good to be true – a great company doing exciting things and I was going back home to Texas.”
Marsch says that Wingstop’s extraordinary growth has been exciting and kept him busy. The company has announced deals for expansion into the United Kingdom with 100 locations planned over the next 12 years, France with 75 restaurants during the next 12 years, Australia and New Zealand with 110 restaurants over the next 10 years, and 30 franchise locations in Malaysia over the next six years.
“Each country has extensive franchise disclosure requirements and regulatory guidelines to follow,” he says. “Each requires contract agreements with vendors and suppliers.”
Marsch says one of the benefits of his job is that his office is directly four floors above the Wingstop test kitchen and that he’s able to frequently stop by for sample tastes. His favorite?
“That’s easy,” he says. “Bone-in original with hot sauce and ranch dip.”
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