In this episode of Jackson Walker Fast Takes, host Courtney White welcomes Houston partner Chevazz G. Brown for a Black History Month conversation. Chevazz reflects on his journey from Thurgood Marshall School of Law to Jackson Walker, sharing how mentorship, community, and allyship shaped his path, including the HBA’s MOLP program and a formative clerkship with Judge Ken Hoyt. He also discusses his litigation practice focused on real estate and partnership disputes and offers a personal perspective on identity, his Army family upbringing, and the power of community in Black history and progress.

Featured This Episode

Our Host:		Episode Guest:
Courtney White Research Attorney, Dallas & Houston Follow on LinkedIn » Instagram: @courthousecouture		Chevazz G. Brown Partner, Houston Follow on LinkedIn »

Episode Transcription

Courtney White: Hi everyone, I am Courtney White and this is Jackson Walker Fast Takes. Jackson Walker deeply values various cultures and cultural experiences, and Jackson Walker is extremely proud of our African American attorneys and allied professionals who have provided leadership and helped shape our firm into what it is today. I asked one of my colleagues to join this episode to share more of their life story and how those experiences have shaped his legal practice here at Jackson Walker. Chevazz Brown is a partner in the Houston office. Chevazz, welcome to the podcast.

Chevazz Brown: Hello, Courtney. How are you doing?

Courtney White: I’m doing well, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast for the first time.

Chevazz Brown: Thank you for inviting me. I know that Fast Takes has been out there for quite some time now. And I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid it until now. I think it’s great content, great hosts, and I’m excited to be here.

Courtney White: Thank you. Well, we’re going to start out by talking a little bit about you and your upbringing, your family, and what brought you to JW.

Chevazz Brown: I’m happy to get into all of that. And probably a good starting place is our law school. And I say our law school because you and I both come from Thurgood Marshall School of Law, which is part of Texas Southern University here in Houston. And you were two years behind me. I was your contracts TA. And time flies.

Courtney White: Time does fly.

Chevazz Brown: Well, it’s a good idea to start there because for Thurgood Marshall School of Law, I would not likely be a lawyer today or I may not be here at the firm. Much like many of our law school classmates, Thurgood was the only opportunity for us. It was the only opportunity for me. I applied; I remember two years in a row.

First year I applied to 30 schools. I did not get admitted to any of them. And then, the second year I applied to another 30 and it was just one school that accepted me and it was Thurgood. And I think back about that journey getting into law school, I did not have the best grades. I think I had maybe a 3.1, a 3.2 from University of Georgia. And my LSAT score was not as high as I would have preferred it to be. And I consider myself fortunate to have gotten into law school. And I feel fortunate that it was Thurgood Marshall, probably the best place for me.

Courtney White: I agree with you on that. I think the environment was incredibly nurturing and I know it was exactly where I needed to be as well. I love the fact that you got to talk about TMSL and obviously TMSL led you to Jackson Walker. So, I’d love to hear a little bit about that journey and your journey as a summer associate.

Chevazz Brown: One of the things I love about Jackson Walker is it does a great job about getting out there and involved in the community and in programs that support lawyers and in particular lawyers of diverse backgrounds. I first learned of Jackson Walker through the Houston Bar Association program. At the time it was called MOLP, the Minority Opportunities in the Legal Profession.

And Jackson Walker was one of several law firms and in-house legal departments and courts that participated in the program by taking first year law students over the summer for essentially internships. And I applied for the program at Jackson Walker. I interviewed with Bruce Ruzinsky and Paul Vrana and enjoyed that interviewing experience. I did not get the position, but I kept in touch with Bruce and he made it a point to keep in touch with me, and he invited me to reapply for the summer associate program after the conclusion of my second year, which I did. And I went through the interview process, met more of Jackson Walker’s lawyers and learned a little bit about its culture and its opportunities. And it really spoke to me, and it fit my personality and I accepted an opportunity to be a summer associate, and I went through that process.

Courtney White: And came to JW, and I think you’re leaving a big part of your story out. So Chevazz what was your class rank when you graduated from TMSL?

Chevazz Brown: Okay, so I knew you were going to raise that. I did finish first in my class.

Courtney White: Which is an awesome accomplishment.

Chevazz Brown: Thanks, bud. I appreciate that. Yes, I was fortunate. I’m just a fortunate guy generally, but I will say that that was a combination, yes, of some hard work and being intentional about the learning process. I was an athlete my entire life. I played basketball in high school; I ran track in college. My priority wasn’t necessarily getting A’s or B’s. It was doing enough so that I could be eligible to compete. When I went to the University of Georgia, it was a little bit of a challenge academically because the rigor, I hadn’t experienced that type of rigor before. And I think my pre-college academic experience was one of an army brat because I am an army brat and I’ll talk about that in a little bit. But I went to three different high schools, and I moved around quite a bit. And so, there wasn’t continuity in the way that some students have.

I think that I was able to survive academically through those years. But then when I went to college, it was a completely different academic environment, and I had to learn how to study. Learn how to internalize that material. It wasn’t really until my junior or senior year that I was able to figure out what worked best for me. When I graduated, obviously I didn’t have the highest GPA, not getting accepted that first year into law school, I wanted to continue to improve academically. So, I decided to work on my master’s in public administration in San Antonio at UT San Antonio.

Courtney White: Now that I never knew. I didn’t know that you worked on a master’s. I had no idea.

Chevazz Brown: Yeah, I started that year, I think this was in 2003. And I took as many courses as I could because I knew that I was going to be trying for law school again. And it was, I think, a 33-hour program. And so, I did 15 hours first semester, 15 hours second semester. And I completed that coursework. There was a lot of research and writing, which I think helped me quite a bit. My grades were of the A’s and B’s, mostly A’s, and that gave me a level of confidence that, just a matter of applying yourself and believing in yourself and you’re going to be okay. And so, I completed the coursework. I didn’t complete the program just yet. I did eventually when I was, I think, a third year, maybe a fourth-year associate while I was here at the firm.

Courtney White: Oh, wow.

Chevazz Brown: Yes, but I did complete that coursework and then got accepted into law school in 2004. In the fall of 2004, I started at Thurgood.

Courtney White: Awesome.

Chevazz Brown: And so, to complete that story, I will say that once I came to law school with the confidence I had built my junior, senior year in college and then in my master’s program, I was prepared to do the work, be disciplined in my academics. And that’s exactly what I did. I dedicated myself to studying. I created a process that worked for me. As you know, law school, the biggest challenge in my opinion is dealing with all the information that’s being thrown at you and learning how to critically think. And I feel that organization and repetitive processes are what helped me and that led me to do well that first semester. It led me to do well in the second semester and that carried on through the rest of my academic experience at Thurgood, and it worked out.

Courtney White: Yeah, and you ended up at Jackson Walker. And so, what do you do now in your practice and how did you end up doing what you do now? Because you’re in our litigation section.

Chevazz Brown: I am in litigation. I’m a trial lawyer or litigator. I do believe there’s a difference between a true trial lawyer and a litigator. One, the trial lawyer is handling many trials, whereas a litigator is doing some trial, but mostly in the office, summary judgments, discovering things of that nature. So, I started, I’m here in our litigation group, and I think going into law school, that was really the only exposure I had to being a lawyer was a trial lawyer because I first went to law school because of this guy named Bobby Donnell. Does that name sound familiar to you?

Courtney White: No.

Chevazz Brown: Okay, he’s before your time. He was the main character in the hit TV show, The Practice. And I love this guy. He was a trial lawyer, civil and criminal, but obviously a lot of drama there. And I thought to myself, super smart, super handsome, a lot of drama in his life. I want to be like Bobby Donald. And so going into law school, and of course, I think it is biased in that it’s trial work. We’re learning about these cases. But I knew coming into Jackson Walker that I wanted to be a trial lawyer; I wanted to be a litigator. And that’s how I ended up in the litigation group.

Where today I do a lot of real estate work, representing landowners, land managers, and land developers. There are so many disputes that arise out of that factual context. So many that relate directly or indirectly to real estate. And it was that work that opened the door to another variety of work that I do, and that’s partnership slash shareholder slash derivative disputes. Disputes between owners of companies or disputes between shareholders of companies on the one hand and those who own or control or govern these companies. And part of that is handling your garden variety breach of contract, breach of fiduciary, duty cases, commercial fraud, commercial tort-based disputes that represents probably about 85 % of the docket that I handle the remaining is some environmental litigation and any sort of commercial business dispute are the kinds of disputes that I handle in my practice.

Courtney White: Well, Chevazz, I’m so excited that you decided to join the podcast and tell us a little bit more about you, your work, and the awesome firm that we both get to work for. So, thank you for coming to share your story during Black History Month.

Chevazz Brown: Sure. I will say that Black History Month is personal to me. I am a Black American. I’m multicultural. And it’s part of my story. It’s part of who I am. So, I’m going to share that with you and with our audience. I’m an Army brat. I grew up with my mom, Colonel Stephanie Wilcher. She served 30 years in the Army.

Courtney White: We thank your mom for her service. She’s an awesome individual.

Chevazz Brown: Absolutely, and I’m sure she’s going to be listening to this. She comes from Portland, Oregon, and she’s one of seven kids. She’s biracial. Her mother’s White and her dad is Black. And my father, whom I don’t know, I met him maybe once or twice when I was young. He’s Native. Native American, Lakota Sioux. So that makes me quite diverse, but I didn’t grow up in the Native culture. I didn’t acquire that from him or his family because I didn’t have that experience with them. And so, I grew up with just my mom, and she grew up in a very poor Black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. And although she didn’t grow up with her Black father, most of their friends and folks that they were around were Black. And so, if you ask her family, and if you ask my family, we self-identify as Black. Our culture is Black. That’s our experience.

When she joined the military, we moved every three or four years to a different site, to a different duty station. So, when people ask me, Chevazz, what is your culture? I say, it’s the Black culture, but also it’s the culture of growing up in a single parent military family. But going back to Black History Month and what it means to me, and it means a couple of things. One, it’s a reminder of the path that Black Americans have taken in this country and elsewhere to where we’re at today. It’s a reminder of that. It’s an appreciation for those folks, including the folks that were instrumental in my life. And I think about my mom, for example, her decision to join the military, which changed positively the course of her kids’ lives. I think about her and her journey. I think about, for example, Judge Ken Hoyt.

He’s one of our federal district judges here in Houston. He’s an alumnus of Thurgood Marshall School of Law. I clerked for him before I came to Jackson Walker. You know, obviously, but for my mom, I wouldn’t be here. I would say, but for Judge Hoyt, I wouldn’t have acquired those early skills that were so critical to surviving at a major firm. As a clerk, I did a lot of research, I did a lot of writing and I had a up close experience seeing some really, really good lawyering and some bad lawyering too. And I took a lot away from that and it prepared me for the rigors of being at Jackson Walker. So, I think about Judge Hoyt and his journey. I think about the Black lawyers that were at some point here at Jackson Walker before I arrived.

You think about Leon Carter, you think about Anthony Hall. These were Black partners. I think our first two Black partners at the firm before I arrived that were trailblazers. I think about them. I think about this rich and vast community of Black lawyers here in Houston and elsewhere that I look up to, that I’ve tried to model myself after, that have created this community of support in high-quality lawyering, and that I think about those things. I also think about Courtney. I think about, in the context of Black History Month, allyship. I think about Bruce Ruzinsky now and how instrumental he was to my journey here and what he does both inside and outside of Jackson Walker for the Black community, for all lawyers, but in particular lawyers of diverse backgrounds. I think about how allies are very much part of the Black community too.

So, I do want to share what Black History Month means to me. It means a lot. It means progress. It means community. When I think about Black History Month, I’m reminded of the power of community. And I’m reminded that my condition today is because of the mobility, fortitude, and perseverance of the Black community. And from this, I know that community is a source of power. Power in the form of protection, power in the form of unlimited resources that are available to me at any time and in the face of any circumstance. And I offer that reminder to you and to our listeners. I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Courtney White: Chevazz, I want to thank you for sharing your story again and for coming on the podcast.

Chevazz Brown: Thanks, Courtney.

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The music is by Eve Searls.

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm, its clients, or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.

Meet Chevazz

Chevazz G. Brown is a Houston trial lawyer focused on business and commercial disputes. He handles breach of contract, fiduciary duty, fraud, and other torts; energy and oil & gas matters (including CERCLA/Superfund contribution); real estate, employment, insurance coverage, investor issues, and matters involving professional and amateur athletes. From early claim assessment and demand strategy to negotiation, dispositive motions, and trial, Chevazz brings the sophistication and experience to deliver results.