As Texas Technology Sector Evolves, Pillsbury Builds an All-Woman Corporate Team in Austin

“When I joined Pillsbury’s Austin office in 2015, it was due in large part to the firm’s outstanding global technology platform and its vision of what the future held for the tech sector in Texas,” said Austin office managing partner Ed Cavazos. “The expansion of our transactional capabilities in Austin, and the development of an all-woman team of corporate lawyers in what is becoming one of the most diverse tech markets in the United States, is an exciting development for our clients and Pillsbury.”

Nunn, who represents public and private companies and private equity funds in complex business transactions, is relocating from Pillsbury’s New York office but has previously practiced in Texas while with Kirkland & Ellis. She advises on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, investments, joint ventures and reorganizations, and has extensive experience in the technology and energy sectors, recently representing NTT DATA on its purchase of Vectorform, Foursquare on separate acquisitions of location data company Factual and Unfolded, and NextEra Energy Transmission on its acquisition of GridLiance. Prior to earning her J.D. from Stanford Law School, Nunn worked as a consultant and coder for a financial technology company. She is admitted to practice in Texas, New York and the District of Columbia, has taught courses in contract drafting at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, and was recently awarded a fellowship to the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity.

de Zorzi joins Pillsbury as special counsel, relocating to Austin after 15 years in Hong Kong and the past five as group senior corporate counsel for AIA Group, the largest independent publicly listed life insurance group in Asia. Prior to her in-house role, de Zorzi was in private practice at Debevoise & Plimpton, focusing principally on capital markets and M&A transactions. She earned her J.D. from University of Miami School of Law and her B.A. from Columbia University. She is admitted in Texas, New York and Hong Kong.

Nunn and de Zorzi are just the latest additions to what has developed into a strong group of women corporate and transactional attorneys in Austin that includes Elizabeth Zimmer, a Chambers USA-ranked tech transactions and sourcing practitioner and a co-founding partner of Pillsbury’s Austin office; Executive Compensation & Benefits partner Jessica Lutrin; Communications counsel Jessica Nyman, and Finance counsel Irina Tsveklova.

Reflective of the firm’s desire to establish a strong pipeline of leading practitioners to support the rapidly expanding Austin market, the office has also recently added numerous junior lawyers to the team, including associates Chelsea Lawson, Aya Hatori and incoming first-year associates Valerie Medina and Gabby Regard (both slated to start in October). The team also includes technical consultants, a patent agent, and Entrepreneur in Residence Laxmi Poruri, who works with many of the firm’s emerging growth clients in the tech sector to help them make connections within the startup ecosystem.

Taken as a whole, this group bolsters Pillsbury’s growing corporate practice and the firm’s ability to support tech deals in Austin.

“I’m immensely proud to work with our talented team—and the raft of impressive women lawyers who’ve recently joined us—to support our technology sector clients and their transactional needs,” said Zimmer. “When I first moved to Austin a decade ago, I noticed immediately how few women lawyers there were in the market then. That is why when we developed our long-term local strategy, we set building a woman-led practice as one of our prime objectives. Now, with the Austin tech market hotter than ever, we’ve developed an extensive roster of practitioners that is perfectly suited to help stalwarts of the Austin tech community and those just recently settling in to scale up, stand out and achieve long-term success.”

More than $5.5 billion was invested in Austin-based companies in 2021 according to Pitchbook data, more than doubling VC totals from 2020 and leading TechCrunch to dub the metro “a city of unicorns and tech giants.” That growing startup community in conjunction with major tech players like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Oracle and Tesla setting up shop in the central Texas resulted in the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) recently ranking Austin as the best market in the United States for tech jobs, with IT jobs there predicted to increase by nearly 14% over the next five years. Meanwhile, even as Austin’s population grows at breakneck pace, it’s also becoming more diverse: data from the 2020 census indicates Austin is now a majority-minority metro.

Pillsbury is inextricably entwined with the technology sector, helping clients emerge, adapt and advance in an ever-changing market. Its global Technology industry team consists of more than 300 industry-focused lawyers focused on meeting the rapidly evolving needs of innovators, entrepreneurs and disruptors worldwide. In recent years, the firm has helped clients complete more than $400 billion in M&A transactions, over $20 billion in venture financings and nearly 100 IPOs. Pillsbury has led in excess of 1,000 strategic outsourcing and technology transactions worth more than half a trillion dollars in contract value and filed approximately 30,000 patents for more than 1,000 clients—almost all of them technology companies.

To read about coverage of this news in Texas Lawyer, please see here.