Jay Old on Being Ready for a Crucial Moment at Zachry Group

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Jay Old just turned sixty-two. Many lawyers have done their most important work by this stage in their career. But when the current general counsel at Zachry Group agreed to take on his role in 2023, he already understood that his career was leading up to this moment.

Old had represented Zachry Group since the nineties, so he knew the company well. Over the years, he also built a strong rapport with Chairman and CEO John Zachry. He worked with all three previous general counsels at the hundred-year-old company.  So, when he joined the company in November 2023, he was aware it was in a challenging position.

A well-publicized, $11 billion liquid natural gasification project, colloquially known as “Golden Pass” encountered significant setbacks due to the compounded effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and unexpected operation disruptions. Old knew all of this, but he didn’t know how it would ultimately redirect his career plans.

“John called me and let me know that his GC had left the organization, and he might need a favor. I told him I’d do anything for Zachry. I figured I would help him find a new general counsel and maybe step in as interim GC while continuing to work with my law firm. A few months later, John called and said he wanted me to be his GC. I told him that wasn’t on the list of things I was ready to do,” Old shares as he laughs.

Old grew up in Beaumont, Texas, not far from the Golden Pass project. He has been fishing on Sabine Lake, next to where the project is located, his entire life. He had been to the massive jobsite—where Zachry had over 5,000 workers at one point—even before going to work for the company. He felt a sense of ownership for helping sort out the companies’ differences, and he jokes that he had the hubris to believe he could solve this problem fairly easily. 

“And then I failed to get it done,” he says.

That is to say, Old couldn’t fix things quite as he’d hoped. But any cursory search about the state of Zachry Group today tends to include phrases like “resilience” and “battled back.” Old gathered a team of lawyers both well-known and new to him, and with a united leadership team supporting the effort, Zachry Group worked through one of the company’s most challenging moments, and they’ve come out stronger for it. 

“I had the privilege of working with Jay in some very challenging situations,” says Bojan Guzina, partner at White & Case LLP. “I found him to be a brilliant strategist, an experienced trial lawyer who is equally comfortable in the courtroom and the boardroom, and a genuinely decent and caring person who leads by example and looks out for his team.”

Zachry Group was profitable last year despite entering and later emerging from bankruptcy protection. Now, the company is poised to lead the way in the engineering, procurement, and construction of gas-fired power plants, data centers, chemical and industrial facilities, and next-generation nuclear power plants, not to mention continuing to grow its nationwide services business.  

Old says one of his biggest points of pride is that instead of shedding executives, the company held onto its leadership team. He believes it is because they had the same shared vision of success. They made sure their vendors came first, and their vendors recovered the money they were owed—a remarkable feat given the stakes. Consequently, the company didn’t lose key vendors or customers but instead managed to build new and stronger relationships. 

“Jay has always had a rare mix of conviction, humility, and clarity. He doesn’t flinch when the stakes are high,” says John Thomas, partner at Hicks Thomas LLP. “What he led at Zachry wasn’t just a legal turnaround, it was a defining moment for the company. The company came out stronger because he brought both heart and backbone to the table. He is a lawyer who is willing to own the moment.” 

“We signed a number of new contracts while in chapter 11 and renewed dozens of services agreements. Not many companies could have done that. We believe that transparency and integrity—as well as three generations of success—helped lead us through the process,” he says.

In recent weeks, Zachry has inked a new EPC contract with Duke Energy to build the first of two planned natural gas fueled power plants in Person County, North Carolina, and signed an MOU with Hyundai which will focus on all phases of nuclear power construction. “We are emerging at a time where demand for our unique abilities is strong, and right in our wheelhouse,” he says. “It’s very exciting. We can feel momentum building.” 

“Jay was instrumental in helping Zachry achieve a successful restructuring,” says Mohsin Y. Meghji, managing partner at M3 Partners, LP. “He knew the business very well, instilling confidence across all stakeholders and advisors, and he helped broker complex deals on multiple fronts. It was a pleasure working with Jay—initially he was a client, but now he’s a good friend.” 

There is a pride in coming in-house for this role that is tangible with Old. Perhaps it’s because he spent so many years convincing himself against the idea of leaving private practice for the corporate life.

“I always felt that if I worked in a corporate law department, all I would be doing is explaining how I’m costing the company money,” the GC explains. “I didn’t want to be the guy who every time I walked into a meeting someone thought ‘how much is this going to cost us?’ But coming here, I felt needed and saw things in a much different way.”

Old says that it was a question of attitude. The general counsel says if you come to work with the idea that your job is to help your company be successful, there’s no better job on the planet. Just months after arriving at his new employer, Old was waking up every day thinking about the 20,000 employees and their families looking to him and the company’s leadership team to do their absolute best to help the organization succeed. 

He says the challenge was equal to the reward in helping the company shed an existential threat, while always keeping an eye on the future. 

“One thing that constantly disappointed me during my law career was that I didn’t feel like I got the opportunity to build anything,” Old says. “Most lawyers don’t make anything, especially if you’re a litigator. But this was a chance to go to work with a friend who builds things.” The GC saw this as a chance to work for a company he believes in, one that has a large impact on the infrastructure of the US and the world economy.

Only recently has Old started to figure out the more routine expectations of a general counsel. Things have slowed down a bit for all the right reasons, allowing him to focus on more holistic culture building and business enablement. On the GC’s legal team, there’s a maxim that’s gotten so much traction that Old’s hearing it repeated in meetings, an occurrence he relays with almost parental pride.

“We talk about getting to yes,” Old says. “Everything we do, we’re here to get to yes. We’re going to come up with unique ways to get there if we have to, but I’m working with an amazing team here that is starting to live that mantra.” 

Old has also created the Zachry Group Champions Award, an acknowledgement to outstanding lawyers in Zachry Group’s orbit who have gone above and beyond to help the company get to yes. It’s a tweaking of an idea he saw employed well by one of his clients when he was in private practice. That award was a signifier that your law firm was best-in-class, and he hopes this award will come to have the same significance. 

We all dream of having that one big moment in our careers, when we get the opportunity to put everything we’ve learned into practice at a crucial moment. Few of us actually get that chance. Old certainly understood his assignment. With just over one year of tenure under his belt, he probably won’t be around to earn the prestigious 25-year recognition Zachry Group celebrates, but whenever he decides to call it a day, he’ll know his contributions made a difference. 

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