Month: November 2017

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_4″ layout=”1_4″ last=”no” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=”” min_height=””][fusion_imageframe image_id=”845″ style_type=”none” stylecolor=”” hover_type=”none” bordersize=”0px” bordercolor=”” borderradius=”0″ align=”none” lightbox=”no” gallery_id=”” lightbox_image=”” alt=”” link=”” linktarget=”_self” hide_on_mobile=”no” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=””]http://lionsofthetexasbar.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/rguyLBF1.jpg[/fusion_imageframe][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ layout=”3_4″ last=”yes” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=”” min_height=””][fusion_text]

By Mark Curriden

(Nov. 14) – Ray Guy remembers clearly the day he decided to become a lawyer.

Guy was a senior at the University of Texas. The 22-year-old was home for spring break when his parents walked into his bedroom. They knew he was debating whether to get a job using his engineering degree or go to law school.

“Go to law school,” they told him.

“It was a watershed moment for me,” he says 45 years later. “It was wise advice and I have never regretted choosing the law for one minute.”

At age 66, Ray Guy is at the pinnacle of the legal profession. He is a senior partner at one of the world’s most prestigious and profitable law firms – Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

For more than four decades, he has represented some of the biggest global companies, including Credit Suisse, American Airlines and Verizon, in some of the most complex and controversial cases the litigation practice has to offer. His peers consider him one of the best trial lawyers in North Texas.

“And Ray is simply one of the kindest, most generous and good-hearted people I have ever met,” says Paul Genender, a fellow partner at Weil. “He’s fiercely competitive, but always very ethical and professional.

“Ray is the epitome of what a great lawyer should be,” Genender says.

As a young man, Guy was often confused for the Oakland Raiders superstar punter of the same name.

“Ray Guy was a rookie player when I was in law school,” he says. “We told people that I would fly to Oakland on Friday nights to kick and then fly back to school. But then they saw me play intramural sports and quickly knew better.”

While Guy is not related to the football player, he has been an all-star in the legal profession during the past 41 years. He has represented numerous high-profile clients in major cases, including:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in a series of cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees involving failed West Texas banks and savings and loans;
• A consortium of paging companies in a $750 million dispute challenging the constitutionality of a Texas statute;
• The owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning in a legal challenge over the proceeds of the sale of the National Hockey League team; and
• Credit Suisse in a $24 billion class action lawsuit brought by homeowners in a failed vacation resort project.

FYI: Guy won all of them.

In fact, Guy’s winning streak started with his first case.

After graduating from UT School of Law in 1976, Guy clerked for Judge Thomas Gibbs Gee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. While clerking, he learned about lawyers signing up to serve as court-appointed counsel in indigent cases.

In 1977, he joined the Dallas corporate law firm Jenkens & Gilchrist and quickly signed up to take a case. He was appointed to represent Enrique Cano Silva, who had been convicted of distributing cocaine and heroin.

Guy reviewed the court record and realized that the key to the conviction was the cooperation law enforcement received from a confidential informant. Silva’s trial lawyers asked the judge to force prosecutors to reveal the name of the informant, but the judge denied the request.

“At that point, my court appearances were limited to a handful of minor cases I handled in traffic court for partners of the firm,” Guy says.

On May 15, 1978, Guy argued to the three-judge panel that the production of the snitch was necessary because he would have provided key testimony necessary for Silva’s defense and that there are clear limits to situations in which an informant’s anonymity is legal in criminal proceedings.

“I was over-prepared for the argument,” Guy says. “I was so nervous. Fortunately, nothing went wrong.”

Four months later, the Fifth Circuit reversed, ruling that the “informant was essential to enable the appellant to develop his theory that he had been framed” and that “the trial court improperly denied [Silva] access to the informant’s identity.”

Guy’s first trial also took place in 1978. He represented a plumbing parts services company in a $7,000 breach of contract dispute. It was a bench trial before state District Judge Joan Winn, who was the first African-American to serve as a jurist in Dallas.

“The plaintiffs supplied contract workers who were volunteers to help my client conduct inventory,” Guy says. “My client refused to pay because the work was horrible.

“No one from the law firm went with me to court because the amount of money at issue was small,” he says. “Even so, I was absolutely nervous. I still get nervous going to trial even after all these years.”

Guy says he enjoyed some of his early cases the most, even though not that much money was at stake. In fact, his hourly rate was only $50 – a small fraction from what it is now.

His first jury trial came in the summer of 1980. He represented a medical insurance company in a $12,000 dispute involving a former employee who had been given pay advances on a commission. The employee quit before the money was paid back.

“The employee was an in-house sales person who was paid on draws,” Guy says. “He claimed he was to be paid a fixed salary.”

The trial before then-state District Judge Joe Fish lasted four days. While the jury was deliberating, opposing counsel in the case, Dallas trial attorney Tom Nash, asked Guy if he could give the young lawyer a tip.

“He told me that it was a mistake for me to tell that jury that his client had lied,” Guy says. “He told me that I could have simply argued that his client was mistaken and that I didn’t need to take on the burden of proving his client lied.

“Thirty-seven years later, I still remember that and I have never done it since,” he says.

Despite the apparent trial misstep, the jury deliberated only 45 minutes before ruling for Guy’s clients.

“I have come to believe in juries more and more,” he says. “I have come to believe in the collective wisdom of 12 people. I was able to get board certified [as a trial lawyer] because I tried many small cases early in my career. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen any longer. It is a problem today getting young lawyers the courtroom experience they need.”

Weil has tried to find ways to get younger lawyers more courtroom experience, says Guy, including sending associates to work for the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program for three months

A few months after making partner at Jenkens in 1983, Guy got an opportunity to represent the FDIC in loan recovery efforts resulting from failed banks in West Texas. His wife was the assistant general counsel at Republic Bank, which bought the claims of some of the failed banks.

“My wife told me that the FDIC was not too popular in Midland and could not find counsel,” he says. “So, I wrote FDIC to offer my services.”

The FDIC took Guy up on his offer. Over the next seven years, he and a West Texas trial lawyer named Royal Furgeson – who later became a federal judge and is now dean of the UNT Dallas College of Law – tackled dozens of cases with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

“A lot of the trials were in front of U.S. District Judge Lucius Bunton in Midland,” he says. “If you went too long in your arguments, he would start shooting you with a water pistol. I learned a great deal about banking law. He chided me a few times.”

A key issue in the litigation was that the president of the 1st National Bank of Midland made promises that he would never enforce the terms of loan agreements signed by other banks – that he would buy back their participations if the underlying loans went bad.

“We showed that those promises, if made, were not enforceable against the FDIC,” Guy says. “So, we were able to successfully defend lawsuits brought by the participating banks.”

In 1990, the Texas Supreme Court, in a case called FDIC v. Coleman (795 S.W.2d 706), ruled in Guy’s favor, establishing that a bank did not owe a duty of good faith and fair dealing to the guarantors of a commercial loan.

“The opinion confirmed that, except in limited circumstances, the courts of Texas – unlike other states – do not imply a duty of good faith and fair dealing in contracts, and thus do not impose tort duties,” Guy says.

Sometimes, litigation requires lawyers to get creative … and lucky.

In 1989, Guy was in his office when a Seattle-based construction industry client called. The client had reached an agreement to buy out his business partner, who was from Abu Dhabi. The business partner, however, stopped making the payments required under their agreement.

“The settlement agreement had a weird clause that said we could sue the business partner wherever he could be found,” Guy says. “My client called mid-morning to say the guy is in town and may only be there for a day.”

Guy quickly drafted a petition and got the court clerk to issue the citation.

“We hired a process server, who pretended to be room service to serve the papers at the Reunion Hyatt,” he says. “Case settled for $500,000.”

In 2010, the majority owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team hired Guy to represent him in a sale dispute with a minority owner. Despite the fact that the sports team was losing money, a minority owner wanted more money for his ownership stake.

The dispute was arbitrated in New York City with the NHL Commissioner deciding the issue.

During the arbitration trial, Guy presented the minority owner with an email he had written to a fellow minority owner predicting in vulgar terminology that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman would not treat him fairly in the legal proceedings. Guy asked the witness to read it aloud.

When the witness hesitated, Bettman said, “I think he wants you to read the part where you say I am going to fuck you.”

The NHL ruled for Guy’s client.

The biggest case by dollar value in Guy’s career involves a series of lawsuits filed against financial giant Credit Suisse involving syndicated loan defaults involving second homes at luxury resorts in multiple locations across the U.S.

Between 2004 and 2007, Credit Suisse arranged large loans – some exceeding $500 million – for real estate developers building luxury homes – each valued for millions of dollars – at resorts at the Yellowstone Mountain Club in Montana, Tamarack in Idaho, Lake Las Vegas in Nevada and Ginn sur Mer in the Bahamas.

Then, the Great Recession hit in 2008, devastating the second-home real estate market. People stopped buying second homes and many stopped paying mortgage loans on homes already purchased. As a result, developers went into default and many declared bankruptcy.

In 2010, homeowners at the four resorts filed a class action lawsuit in Boise, Idaho against Credit Suisse and Cushman & Wakefield, which issued appraisals for many of the loans.

The lawsuit claimed that the homeowners lost the use of amenities at their resorts – ski lifts, golf courses and marinas – because of the loan defaults and bankruptcies of the developers. The homeowners claimed that Credit Suisse loaned too much money to the developers and Cushman & Wakefield issued flawed appraisals to support the supposedly-too-large loans.

“On a variety of theories, the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed that 3,000 homeowners and property owners suffered actual damages of $8 billion, which should be trebled under RICO and other theories,” Guy says.

Guy and the Weil legal team successfully had many of the causes of action dismissed early in the litigation.

Handling the disputes as a class action was not the superior method, Guy argued to the court, because “predominance was lacking due to individual issues involving the plaintiffs’ claims.”

The trial judge agreed denied class certification.

As the case for 69 property owners headed for trial in the late summer of 2016 as a collective action, the Weil team argued in motions for summary judgment that all the remaining claims should be dismissed.

In July 2016, the federal judge agreed and the entire case was dismissed.

“I love being in court,” Guy says. “It has been a true privilege to be a lawyer and to work with so many great clients. Every case brings new challenges. I would not have changed a thing about my career.”

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[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_4″ last=”no” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_imageframe lightbox=”no” lightbox_image=”” style_type=”none” hover_type=”none” bordercolor=”” bordersize=”0px” borderradius=”0″ stylecolor=”” align=”none” link=”” linktarget=”_self” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” hide_on_mobile=”no” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_imageframe][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ last=”yes” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_text]By Mark Curriden

(Oct. 24) – Nina Cortell rose from the counsel table to make her first oral argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1981.

The young lawyer felt comforted, as opposing counsel had presented his side in the complex securities dispute without much push-back from the three-judge panel. Suddenly, the docile court became a hot panel.

“I barely got my name out when I was hit with a barrage of questions — and that continued for the entirety of my time before the court,” says Cortell, who represented a real estate developer who was challenging a contract because the counter party was not a registered broker.

“This led my opposing counsel to be a bit smug on the flight back [from New Orleans to Dallas],” she says.

Months later, the lawyers realized they had misread the appellate court, which issued a unanimous opinion in favor of Cortell’s client.

“The other lesson I learned [in that case] was not to stay on the second floor of a hotel in the French Quarter, facing Bourbon Street, the night before argument,” she says. “The partying on Bourbon Street was loud and went late, making an anxious night even more challenging. That’s the last time I made that mistake. Since then, I haven’t stayed in the French Quarter on the night before an oral argument.”

Nearly four decades later, Cortell is a senior partner at Haynes and Boone in Dallas and is widely respected as one of the best and most successful appellate lawyers in Texas. She broke through glass ceilings, gracefully convinced leaders of the legal profession to hire and promote more women and proved through her actions that gender was not a factor when it comes to being a great advocate.

Lawyers who know Cortell say she is never meek or shy to speak up, but always does so in a respectful and often quiet manner.

Cortell has successfully argued scores of major cases to the state and federal appellate courts on behalf of some of the biggest corporate clients in Texas, including American Airlines, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Energy Transfer Partners and Trinity Industries.

“We searched for the best appellate lawyer to handle our case and everyone pointed us to Nina,” says NextEra Energy General Counsel Charles Sieving. “Nina did not disappoint.

“Nina mastered the record just as good as the trial lawyer did in our case,” Sieving says. “She is able to isolate the key issues and then crisply and clearly advocate the views of her clients.”

Cortell has received nearly every award that legal organizations hand out. The University of Texas School of Law gave her the Distinguished Alumni Award. The Dallas Bar named her Outstanding Lawyer of the Year in 2009. The Texas Center for Legal Ethics honored her with the 2013 Jack Pope Professionalism Award.

She is a founding member of the Center for Women in the Law at the University of Texas.

Haynes and Boone Managing Partner Tim Powers says Cortell has been a huge reason for the firm’s success during the past half-century, pointing out that she was Haynes and Boone’s first woman lawyer, first woman partner and first woman to serve on the executive committee.

“Nina is a quiet, low-key leader, who has the absolute respect of every lawyer at this firm,” Powers says. “She brings wisdom, great judgment and an amazing intelligence to every issue and every case.”

To understand Cortell’s success, thought processes and drive, you must examine her family and upbringing. Her knowledge and expertise are learned, while her intelligence and drive are inherited. She is, after all, the only Lion of the Texas Bar who is a descendant of Albert Einstein. Her grandmother and Einstein were cousins.

Anneliese Amelie Feibel, Cortell’s mother, was born in Frankfurt, Germany and later moved to Munich, where she worked as an au pair on the very block where Adolph Hitler lived. Her mother and two siblings were kicked out of German public schools as the result of anti-Jewish laws. They eventually fled to London and later to the U.S., where her brother became a furniture maker in Dallas.

When Hitler took over Luxembourg, Cortell’s grandparents fled to Marseilles, where they hid for a couple years. But in May 1944, shortly before D-Day, they were captured and sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered by the Nazis.

Cortell’s father, Walter Louis Kocherthaler, was born in Madrid to a prominent German-Jewish family. He studied at Cambridge and the Sorbonne before moving to the U.S. in the mid-1930s, seeking a livelihood in the arbitrage business in New York City. He became a U.S. citizen when he joined the Army during World War II, serving in the intelligence branch as a translator for prisoners of war.

Feibel, who worked as a clerk at Republic National Bank, and Kocherthaler, who was a traveling salesman, met on a blind date in 1949 set up by mutual friends.

“After that first date, my mother told her friends from work that she had met the man she would marry,” Cortell says. “They married seven weeks later.

“My mother was a tumultuous character with a heavy German accent. She was a German Lucille Ball,” she says. “My dad changed his last name to Cortell. He was a gentleman in the greatest sense of the word – a true European, intellectual and soft-spoken.”

Even though Cortell grew up in a modest, one-story home, one room was dedicated as a library with books from floor to ceiling. Her father loved history and would read stories from books he was reading at bedtime. English was the second language in her home; German was primarily spoken. Education was a priority for her parents.

“I was raised [to understand] that I had to take care of myself,” she says.

For third grade show-and-tell, Cortell took Einstein’s pipe to school. One boy, she remembers, was so awed that he promised to never wash his hand ever again after holding the genius’s pipe.

In 1952, Einstein wrote a one-page note in German to Cortell’s parents congratulating them on Nina’s birth. He signed it, “Your Albert.”

Cortell graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas in three years and then received her law degree in 1976 from UT, where she excelled in moot court.

During her second year, she set up interviews with 15 law firms. She received only one offer.

“People ask why I chose Haynes and Boone,” she says. “Well, Haynes and Boone chose me.”

Cortell was the 13th lawyer at Haynes and Boone, which now boasts more than 600 lawyers worldwide. Her first hourly billable rate was $50, roughly one-eightieth what it is today. In 1982, the firm made Cortell its first woman partner.

No single lawyer had more of an impact on Cortell than legendary trial lawyer George Bramblett, who died last year.

“The joy and love George had practicing law was infectious,” she says. “He taught us by being a superior role model.”

In an interview two months before his death, Bramblett told The Texas Lawbook that hiring Cortell was “the best decision I ever made as a lawyer.”

Cortell worked with Bramblett on most of her most important cases, which impressed upon her the need to remain professional and ethical even while zealously advocating for the client. During her decades-long career, Cortell has been thrust into some of the biggest civil lawsuits of her generation.

For example:

• During her rookie year at Haynes and Boone, she became involved in representing Texas International Airlines, which later became Continental Airlines, in litigation trying to force Southwest Airlines out of Love Field. The litigation lasted on and off for many years and eventually resulted in Continental Airlines being able to conduct flights out of Love Field.
• She represented Exxon Mobil against Lloyds of London when the global insurer refused to cover billions of dollars in costs spent by the Irving energy giant as part of the cleanup of the Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
• American Airlines turned to Cortell to successfully convince the court to significantly reduce a jury award against the Fort Worth-based airline in a dispute over whether signs with flight information on highways leading to the airport caused traffic crashes.
• Cortell also represented Texas public school systems in the decade-long legal battle over the financing of education. She obtained a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court overhauling the Texas public school finance system.

“It has been a true honor and privilege to represent the school children of Texas to improve our educational system,” she says. “The issue was ripeness. The case had been dismissed below and we were arguing that the Court should allow the case to proceed, to ensure needed reforms.”

Cortell concluded her argument at the Texas Supreme Court with a favorite quote from a Jewish text (Pirke Avot): “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from trying to do so.”

The justices ruled for Cortell’s clients, which set the stage for the ultimate victory in the case.

Like all of the other Lions of the Texas Bar, Cortell has experienced some embarrassing courtroom moments. One involved a contract dispute going to trial in 1978 – her second year of practice.

“It began horribly. I had been called to trial in two cases on the same day and for some reason thought a different case would proceed,” she recalls. “So, I spent the weekend completing my preparation … for the wrong case.

“I learned this when I went down to court on Monday morning, told Judge A that I would be trying a case in Judge B’s court,” she says. “Judge A overruled me, called Judge B to say I would proceed in Judge A’s court that very afternoon.

“That was followed by a very slow walk back to my office, to switch out the files in my trial briefcase and return to court to try a case I was not fully prepared to try,” she says.

Thankfully, the weather gods intervened that night and brought an unusual amount of snow to Dallas, which caused court to cancel the next day.

“The trial was re-set several months later,” she says. “You may rest assured that I was fully prepared for that setting — and happy to say I won the case. I’ve never been caught that flat-footed again.”

Cortell’s father died when she was 19, but her mother, who died in 1991, was able to see her argue a case to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

“Mom was very concerned after the argument because Judge [Irving L.] Goldberg spoke harshly to me during oral argument,” Cortell says. “Mom was very pleased when I won the case.”

At age 65, Cortell shows no sign of slowing down. It is clear that she is in higher demand than ever before by corporate clients – especially those facing litigation at a bet-the-company level.

Trinity Industries hired Cortell as part of the legal team that last month successfully appealed a $663 million False Claims Act judgment stemming from a whistleblower’s claim regarding guardrail end terminals that were approved for use by the Federal Highway Administration.

Cortell’s current docket includes representing the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System in its ongoing legal disputes with the City of Dallas and ETP in its $535 million partnership disputes with Enterprise Products.

She also represents ExxonMobil in its legal battles with the state attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York regarding state investigations into allegations that the energy company knew but hid research on climate change.

“Nina is a superb attorney who always demonstrates the highest degree of integrity and intellectual advocacy in the courthouse,” Exxon Mobil General Counsel Randy Ebner says. “She is among the most respected advocates in the legal community and brings unparalleled civility into the courtroom.

“Her appellate advocacy skills, including her strategic analysis, creativity and phenomenal preparation results in the best possible representation for her clients,” Ebner says. “As a seasoned advocate, her passion and dedication to the profession has established her as a role model for future generations of attorneys.”[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_4″ last=”no” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_imageframe lightbox=”no” lightbox_image=”” style_type=”none” hover_type=”none” bordercolor=”#e2e2e2″ bordersize=”1px” borderradius=”0″ stylecolor=”” align=”none” link=”” linktarget=”_self” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” hide_on_mobile=”no” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_imageframe][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ last=”yes” spacing=”yes” center_content=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”” animation_speed=”0.1″ animation_offset=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_text]By Mark Curriden

(Nov. 1) – Billie Ellis was a baby lawyer just out of law school in 1978 when his bosses at Vinson & Elkins asked him to represent a long-time firm client in buying a $2 million mansion in River Oaks.

The transaction seemed simple enough, except Ellis’ client almost killed the deal when he learned the sellers were not including the $150 washing machine as part of the purchase.

“Tell you what,” Ellis told the millionaire client, “if you close this deal, I will buy you the washing machine for $150.” The buyer agreed, and the deal closed.

A few days later, Ellis put in a reimbursement request for the $150 Maytag, which the firm readily paid.

“It taught me that people can be irrational on personal issues and that lawyers need to find solutions to their problems,” says Ellis, who points out that he ended up representing the client in several other, much more significant business transactions.

With four decades of practicing law under his belt, Ellis is widely recognized as one of the best commercial real estate transactional lawyers in Texas history. He’s represented some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals in the state, including the Bass brothers, Richard Rainwater and David Bonderman.

“At the core of Billie is honesty,” says former TPG Capital General Counsel Clive Bode, who has worked with Ellis on various projects over nearly 40 years.

“Billie says what has to be said, even if you don’t want to hear it,” Bode says. “He follows all the rabbit trails in every transaction. He turns sharp corners. And he understands the economics of business deals.”

Even litigators appreciate the experience that Ellis brings to law firms.

“Billie is a Texas-sized character,” says Dallas trial lawyer Tom Melsheimer, a fellow partner with Ellis at Winston & Strawn. “Billie has been involved in and on the ground floor of some of the biggest and most influential private equity funds in the country – when most people had no idea what a private equity fund was.”

Born in Galveston, Ellis moved to a milk farm in East Texas with his family when he was six. They had about 60 head of Holstein cattle.

“My father worked seven days a week – no weekends or holidays off,” he says. “He got up every morning at 4:30 to milk the cows, even when he had a broken shoulder and pneumonia. He did it because he had to and because he had a passion for it.”

The oldest of three children, Ellis learned to drive the tractor when he was just a boy, and his father paid him $1.50 an hour.

“My father said I worked like a man and I should be paid for it,” he says. “My father never complained if the weather destroyed a crop that he nurtured for months. His grit, street smarts or – in our case – farm smarts, optimism and example prepared me for the much simpler life of Big Law.

“I hated farming, and I wasn’t very good at it. I knew there was life outside of Texas and I jumped at the first chance that came along,” he says.

When Ellis was 16, he had the opportunity to attend a boarding school in Kansas. He was so eager to leave the farm that he lied to his parents that school started on Aug. 20 – two weeks before it actually did.

Ellis attended the University of Texas, where he studied American history. He paid for his schooling by selling dictionaries door-to-door in California. He made about $25,000 for 10 weeks of work.

“If you can sell a dictionary to a housewife in Riverside, California, with two screaming kids pulling at her, you can easily convince a general counsel or private equity client to use the services of your internationally-known law firm,” he says.

In college, Ellis had visions of being a history professor, smoking a pipe, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and avoiding the real world. The idea of law school also intrigued him.

“I realized that making partner at a big law firm seemed easier than making tenure at a university,” he says.

After getting his MBA from Southern Methodist University and his J.D. from the University of Houston, Ellis went to work in Houston at V&E, which put him to work at an hourly rate of $40.

“V&E put me right to work and let me close deals,” he says. “The training was incredible. V&E was extremely entrepreneurial.”

After only three years at V&E, a small start-up law firm in Fort Worth called Kelly, Hart & Hallman called seeking a real estate lawyer.

“My wife was 7 months pregnant. I had just bought a house I could not afford, but something told me that this firm of eight lawyers who needed a real estate lawyer to represent a family called the Bass Brothers was a good bet,” he says. “Several of my fellow associates called me crazy. A few partners questioned my ability to reason and suggested I pay for reality therapy.

“Fort Worth was known as a cow town. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time,” he says. “It turned out to be one of the best professional and personal decisions of my life.”

Ellis joined Kelly Hart in 1982.

His first client at his new firm was Fort Worth entrepreneur Jim Phiilips, who needed legal work done on covenants, conditions and restrictions involving a small townhouse development.

“I explained to Billie that I had a very limited budget, did not want anything complicated and needed only a simple two- or three-page set of covenants and restrictions,” says Phillips, who is now the chair of Fort Worth investment firm FundCorp. “A week later, Billie delivered 400 pages of state-of-the-art CCR documents. A few weeks later my monthly billing statement arrived with a balance due three or four times the budget I had given Billie.”

Phillips called Ellis to say he appreciated the “state-of-the-art documents,” but that it cost too much. Within an hour, Ellis was at Phillips’ house.

“He said he was delivering what I needed instead of what I wanted [and] the discussion concluded with him simply stating that he would charge me nothing for the work, wanted to keep me as a client and therefore would represent me from now on at no charge,” Phillips says. “I foolishly said that was ridiculous and agreed to pay his full bill.”

Ellis spent much of the next 17 years representing the Bass Brothers (Sid, Ed, Robert and Lee) in some of the most high-profile and complex corporate real estate transactions in the U.S.

“The Bass Brothers were some of the most important investors to come out of Texas,” he says. “They were Yale-educated, urbane and hired only the best professionals to lead their investments. In later years, they each went their separate ways and had their own business interests.”

One of Ellis’ earliest projects for Ed Bass came in 1984, when he posed as a Texas rancher to purchase 2,500 acres in Arizona.

“It was a very unique scientific and human experiment called Biosphere II,” he says. “The goal was to buy the land from the University of Arizona without tipping off the real owner or letting them know what the land was to be used for.”

Biosphere II was a decade-long experiment that included eight people living inside this self-contained settlement, or so-called “recreated Earth,” as a way to possibly settle Mars.

“The project included working on cutting edge construction contracts for perhaps the world’s largest geodesic dome to intellectual property and employment contracts for the scientist and layman that were scheduled to live in the dome for two years,” Ellis says.

Ellis mostly worked for Bob Bass. One of the highest profile deals they did was the purchase – and then quick resale – of the famous Plaza Hotel in New York.

Ellis was actually at the hospital with his wife, who was giving birth to the couple’s third child just before Christmas in 1987 when the phone rang. David Bonderman, who was the chief investment officer for Bob Bass, was calling about an urgent deal that needed to be done.

Just months earlier, Ellis had been playing golf at Fort Worth’s elite River Crest Country Club with Bass Brothers executive Don McNamara when his ball veered far off course toward this huge house that was being renovated by architect David Schwartz, who later designed Bass Hall and the Ballpark at Arlington.

“We were curious and decided to go inside the house to retrieve the ball and see what was going on,” Ellis says. “After a quick look at the empty house and getting our ball, we noticed that our golf shoes had left very slight marks on the newly installed hardwood floors.”

The house belonged to Bonderman, who he met a week later over a pastrami sandwich. (Ellis actually bought the house from Bonderman 15 years later.)

On the Christmas Eve call, Bonderman informed Ellis that they had learned that the Plaza Hotel was for sale and that a young, aggressive real estate developer named Donald Trump was interested. Bob Bass wanted to buy it first with the idea of selling later to Trump at a profit.

Three days after his daughter was born, Ellis and a team of 15 lawyers and paralegals set up camp at The Plaza. He spent 99 of the first 128 days of 1988 at the hotel facing Central Park. He billed 320 hours that January alone.

“Whether you are fighting a war or closing a deal, feeding the troops is very important,” he says. “I remember calling the kitchen at The Plaza one night and ordering 20 hamburgers, four fried chickens, onion rings, French fries, two apple pies and a gallon of ice cream.”

Once Bass finished the hotel’s acquisition from Westin in January 1988 for $250 million, Ellis immediately entered into negotiations with Trump and his advisers. He met Trump in his office, which Ellis says had its walls covered with magazines featuring Trump on their covers.

“I did not know Donald Trump from Adam,” Ellis says. “He asked me if I liked boxing and told me that he was advising Mike Tyson. He was much more low-key than he is now.”

In March 1988, Bass sold The Plaza to Trump for a reported $410 million – pocketing more than $150 million in profit in less than six months.

“Billie is detail-oriented to the point of being maniacal,” Bonderman says. “Billie comes across as a country boy, but he gets the best of those New Yorker lawyers.”

By September 1988, Bass, Bonderman and Ellis were hip-deep in an even larger deal – the acquisition of California-based American Savings and Loan Association, which was the largest thrift in the nation to fail.

The transaction involved the transfer of more than $30 billion in assets.

“We manually had to go through 34,000 loans,” he says. “There were thousands and thousands of pages of deeds and assignments and conveyances of mortgages and all the regulatory documents that went with it.”

Each asset had to be reviewed so that the Bass Brothers could understand the risks and costs. It was a yearlong task that had to be finished in four months.

Ellis and his team created an eight-volume document, which immediately was named “The Memo from Hell.” The memo essentially created a 100-page checklist for all the lawyers and staff to use as a guideline for examining assets.

“Billie had more briefing books and due diligence books in the American S&L deal than Quakers had oats,” says Bode.

Bonderman says it was typical Ellis.

“Billie is famous for his lists,” Bonderman says. “He has lists of lists.”

The $2.1 billion deal closed by the end of the year and was widely recognized by multiple legal publications, including the National Law Journal, as the “Deal of the Year” in 1988.

The 1990s produced even more deals for Ellis to handle, especially when Bonderman split from the Bass brothers to start the private equity fund Texas Pacific Group, now called TPG Capital. Bonderman turned to Ellis to handle parts of TPG’s $450 million acquisition of then-bankrupt Continental Airlines.

In 1999, Ellis left Kelly Hart to co-found with Bonderman a private equity fund called The Halifax Group, which has $220 million in investments in small-to-midsized healthcare companies and auto supply services.

Ellis sold his interest in The Halifax Group in 2004.

“I played golf for one month, but my golf game did not get any better, so I started talking to law firms about practicing again,” he says.

The leaders at Locke Lord asked him for his business development plan.

“I don’t have a business plan,” he told them. “But I have a lot of rich friends.”

Locke Lord was sold. During his dozen years at the Dallas-based corporate firm, Ellis represented TPG in several major transactions, including its $39 billion acquisition of Harrah’s Casinos.

“We had 141 linear feet of paperwork that we had to submit in the Harrah’s deal,” Bode says. “We had so much paper that we could not send the shit out by FedEx. We had to use multiple trucks to ship the documents to Las Vegas, Illinois, Louisiana and other places. It was a painful task, but Billie’s due diligence and leadership was significant in getting it done.”

Ellis says it was a deal with a lot of unusual requirements.

“We had 10 associates using planes, trains and automobiles to file documents with state regulatory agencies wherever Harrah’s had operations,” he says.

In February 2017, Ellis joined two-dozen other lawyers in opening the Dallas office of Winston & Strawn. He’s still representing TPG in several matters, including its Evergreen portfolio fund.

“I have been lucky to have worked very early on with some of the most important and well-known real estate and private equity investors in the 20^th and 21^st centuries,” he says. “This work not only included working on their premier transactions, but I also worked daily on taking care of their important and highly sensitive personal and family matters.”

Ellis agrees that the practice of law has changed during his 40 years in the business.

“When I started at Vinson & Elkins in 1978, a hard-working lawyer who had better-than-average legal and client development skills had a good chance of success,” he says. “Legal fees were important, but profits per partner and leverage were not the Holy Grail. Bills were sent out and paid without much debate.

“Today, a lawyer must possess superior legal and client development skills, be a student of the legal markets, be on the leading front of innovation and have a nuanced understanding of her clients,” he says.

“My dad is 87 and he still goes to work every day and loves it,” Ellis says. “So, I want to continue as long as I can contribute.”

Bonderman doubts Ellis will call it quits anytime soon.

“I don’t think Billie will ever retire,” he says. “He loves it too much.”[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]