Jack Balagia

Jack Balagia is a lawyer, arbitrator, mediator, and serves as the Executive Director of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Energy Center and adjunct professor at Texas Law. He previously served as Vice President and General Counsel of Exxon Mobil Corporation. Before joining Exxon in 1998, Mr. Balagia worked in private practice in Austin and Houston for more than twenty years with a practice focused on energy litigation and regulation, and First Amendment Law.

Mr. Balagia graduated from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A., 1973 and J.D., 1976) and served as law clerk to U.S. District Chief Judge W.M. Taylor Jr. in Dallas, Texas. He joined the Austin firm of McGinnis, Lochridge and Kilgore in 1977. He joined Exxon's Litigation section in 1998, was named Assistant General Counsel in 2004, and General Counsel in 2010. He reached mandatory retirement at Exxon Mobil on November 1, 2016.  

During his tenure as General Counsel, he served as co-chair of the Civil Justice Reform Group, a member of the Board of Overseers for the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, the Board of Directors of the National Center for State Courts, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Legal Reform of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He continues to serve on the Board of the Center for American and International Law.

 He has worked in numerous capacities with committees of the State Bar of Texas, including several years as Chairman of the Bar’s Public Affairs Committee. In 2000, the Texas Supreme Court appointed him to the Court’s Board of Disciplinary Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Texas lawyer disciplinary matters, and he served as Chairman from 2003-05. In 2016, the Court appointed him to the Texas Commission to Expand Civil Legal Services. He served on the Board and as Vice Chair of the Houston Bar Foundation, which oversees financial support for Houston Bar pro bono activities. He has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America and has been named a Texas Super Lawyer by Texas Monthly magazine.

 Mr. Balagia currently serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the University of Texas Law School Foundation and is a Past President of the Law School Alumni Association Executive Committee. He has also served in various leadership positions for ExxonMobil’s Gulf Coast and North Texas Employee Charitable Giving campaigns and as a member of the Salvation Army Dallas Ft. Worth Advisory Board.

 During his career, Mr. Balagia has been honored by a number of organizations for his contributions to the community and the legal profession, including the Lifetime Achievement in Energy Litigation from the Center for American and International Law (2010), and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Hispanic Bar Association of Houston (2012), the Association of Corporate Counsel and D CEO Magazine (2011) and the Texas Civil Justice League (2016). The Houston Bar Foundation honored him with its James B. Sales Pro Bono Leadership Award in 2014 and received the Dallas Anti-Defamation League’s Jurisprudence Award in 2015. In 2014, the University of Texas Law School honored him with its Outstanding Alumnus Award.