Features Region: Southwest

Andrea Palmer admits she didn’t fully understand the insurance business when she joined Higginbotham Insurance Agency Inc. in April 2018. But she’s a quick study, and as she learned the intricacies of insurance law, regulations and licensing at the brokerage based in Fort Worth, Texas, she also found ways to improve legal operations. Now the […]

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, N95 masks—recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for protection against COVID-19—were rapidly selling out and vaccines were frustratingly far on the horizon. Making matters worse, counterfeit personal protection equipment was flooding the market as demand far outpaced supply. According to Adel Sander, Ascend […]

Imagine being handed not one but 20 contracts. At 40 pages long each, they can take two days to review—and they need to be reviewed immediately. Now, imagine software that can review the contracts in the time it takes someone to grab a much-needed cup of coffee. That’s the power of artificial intelligence. For General […]

In 1999, when University of Texas sophomore Tiffany Taylor accidentally missed her date with Leon Chen, she baked and delivered a batch of cookies to him as an apology. Inspired, the sophomores took a $20 budget, a cell phone, a recipe they created, and Leon’s college apartment oven and started Tiff’s Treats Cookie Delivery. At […]

Anthony Sharett says he always wanted to make a difference for those who needed it most, and that factored into him joining Meta Financial Group Inc. in the fall of 2019. For this is the Sioux Falls-headquartered holding company of MetaBank, a financial services support company with locations throughout the United States, as well as financial agent to the […]

Sometimes in life and the business world, you find yourself back where you started. Such was the case when, earlier this year, Crescent Real Estate re-acquired the landmark property and its namesake: The Crescent, a 1.3 million-square-foot mixed-use property in Dallas. According to General Counsel Andrew Lombardi, the re-acquisition was one of the largest single […]

“Be careful of what you wish for,” the saying goes. But for Anne Brooksher-Yen, who’d spent 10 years in New York City firms after earning her J.D. in 2006, the only hazard in taking a job at Celanese, a Fortune 500 chemical company in Dallas, was the role would deliver growth opportunities beyond her expectations. […]

While Anthony “Tony” Nolte may not have known much about the mortgage industry aside from the details of his own loan, his decades of business development and legal experience at Shell Oil made him a likely choice to be CFO and general counsel at Open Mortgage. To be sure, the lending regulatory details he’s learning […]

There are some things in life everyone needs. A bathroom, for example. Moving from the construction and energy industries to a once family-owned now multibillion-dollar business, Andy Iverson says he was a perfect match to serve as general counsel for American Bath Group, a fast-paced manufacturing company looking to change the bathware industry. “I get […]

Social progress notwithstanding, women at all levels in business face workplace obstacles largely spared to men. These obstacles increase for women with criminal backgrounds. So says Aamna Jalal who, since January, has been working with and providing support to women in prison through Televerde, a global inside sales and demand generation company based in Phoenix […]