Aylssa Schindler was three months old when her father gave $100 to her mother, an 18-year-old cocktail waitress in Reno, Nev., and then left his family for good. He never paid a dime in child support because her mother could not afford a lawyer.
Struggling to survive, Schindler and her mother moved multiple times a year - each time trying to find a better life. At every turn, there were hurdles, including landlords and employers who took advantage of them financially.
“I knew from personal experience that access to legal representation can make such a huge difference in outcome,” Schindler said. “If my mom had had access to an attorney, she might have been able to get child support from my father or contest a landlord’s refusal to refund a security deposit after I watched her work all night to make sure we left the apartment pristine.”
“Just a few hours with a lawyer - just about any lawyer - can make difference in the lives of so many disadvantaged people,” she said.
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Schindler is now senior counsel at Chevron Corp. in Houston where she handles multimillion-dollar transactional agreements for the global energy giant.
But she had her mother in mind when she coengineered a major pro bono effort involving 20 lawyers from Chevron and the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright in 2018 and 2019 to help low-income victims of Hurricane Harvey. Together, they assisted 10 disadvantaged Houstonians on matters ranging from securing clean titles to their property and pursuing claims with FEMA to issues of contractor fraud and tax implications.
Many Chevron and Norton Rose Fulbright employees had been severely impacted by Hurricane Harvey, which made the project personal for all involved.
“This was an opportunity for our lawyers to have a direct impact on someone’s life, and we did,” Schindler said.
The joint pro bono project was a huge success. Schindler and Norton Rose Fulbright lawyer Lauren Brogdon are being awarded the 2020 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Creative Partnership on Dec. 10 for their joint efforts on the Harvey initiative.
Schindler said Brogdon deserves the credit.
“Chevron is a valued client and we looked for ways to work on some pro bono matters together, and Hurricane Harvey victims seemed to be a great way to combine our talents and resources for the good,” said Brogdon, whose home was severely damaged by flooding from Hurricane Harvey.
Schindler said she started thinking about being a lawyer in elementary school. When she was 12, she wrote in her personal journal, “How am I supposed to be a ruthless lawyer if I cry at the end of ‘Mystic Pizza?’”
In 1995, she went to the University of Oklahoma where she earned an interdisciplinary degree that covered literature, history, philosophy and ancient and modern languages.
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Schindler graduated from George Washington University Law School in 2003, when she joined Jennings Strouss & Salmon, which represented municipalities, electric cooperatives and industrial clients before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Schindler said she slowly developed a passion for energy law.
“The longer I have been in this practice area, the more it has become clear to me just how much of a role that energy plays in advancing human progress,” she said. “I love that I get to help ensure that this progress continues in a responsible and sustainable manner.”
She decided to go in-house in 2007, and discovered it was an entirely different experience.
“It is like getting to see behind the curtain in Oz,” she said. “The questions you get aren’t likely to be clearly answered by case law or a treatise, so you have to be able to provide your clients with guidance through what may be murky waters. You help solve problems before they rise to the level of needing outside counsel, and you never know what is going to come across your desk on any given day.”
Schindler joined Chevron’s legal department in 2013. For two years, she was the oil giant’s lead lawyer for its pipeline assets in the Gulf of Mexico, handling commercial and regulatory matters.
In 2015, she became Chevron’s senior counsel handling commercial and land transactional matters for its mid-continent business unit, which included production in the Permian Basin.
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Schindler said she is especially proud of her work heading Chevron’s pro bono efforts.
Chevron has agreed to tackle 17 divorce cases in partnership with Houston Volunteer Lawyers. Family law cases make up nearly 50 percent of the need at HVL, but they are one of the hardest areas of the law to find pro bono representation.
Brogdon approached Schindler in October 2018 about the joint pro bono project that required expertise Chevron lawyers have in real property and regulatory experience to help hurricane victims with title clearing and FEMA appeals arising out of Harvey.
“Even two years after Harvey, there were still so many in Houston who couldn’t move forward because of their lack of legal representation,” Schindler said.
Chevron and Norton Rose Fulbright agreed to tackle 10 cases together.
Schindler represented a 55-year-old client with a complicated family background that made it difficult to obtain an official title to the property. The client’s father died years earlier without a will and he had remarried. There were additional complications regarding a half-sister.
Schindler worked with the client to establish heirship of the estate so that she could get the funding relief needed to proceed with repairs to her house.
Chevron used its nonlawyer employees as translators and notaries.
“The legal aid provided in this program was crucial in helping the clients take to first step towards recovery,” Brogdon said.
For a longer version of this article, please visit TexasLawbook.net.
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