Building Trust

Cathy Altman shows a visitor at her home office a chunk of irregularly shaped metal, barely bigger than a fist but heavy as a bowling ball—a fragment of a power plant turbine blade from a federally owned facility in Valladolid, Mexico. It’s a souvenir of sorts, a reminder of how one of those blades broke in mid-spin, pieces flying off and shattering other blades, prompting a system failure and a lawsuit that would pull her into construction litigation for good.

Altman, 55, a disarming, down-to-earth redhead, was in her early 30s when she joined the power plant case, working with a generally young team and a partner barely older than she was.

“We were handling this international case, working with fascinating people from all over the world,” says the construction litigator at Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal in Dallas.  “It was beyond the realm of anything I ever thought I would do as this little immigrant farm kid.”

The legal battle revolved around whether the blade had broken because of a manufacturing defect or improper maintenance. It’s a common theme in construction litigation. The insurance company had paid out and filed a subrogation claim, seeking to recoup its losses from the manufacturer, which Altman’s team represented.

With the help of Mexican and German engineers, her team argued that the failure was caused by heavy fuel oil that overstressed the system. The case, held in Dallas, settled in 2005 on the eve of trial. The client firm was satisfied enough with the terms that it hired Altman for other projects.

“That case sealed for me that I love what I do and I want to do more,” Altman says. “It kind of blew me away that I could be part of something that global in nature.”

The experience was pivotal in two ways: First, Altman discovered she loved learning how projects were designed and built, then digging into what caused them to fail. Second, it offered the element of collaboration—a principle essential to farm life as well.

“We just synced up,” Altman says. “That made me realize the power of a 70-person firm in Dallas. There were no egos. Everybody did the right thing for their level of experience, and the clients trusted us completely. That was the moment where I said, ‘Wow, I can do really cool things in this practice area.’”

Within a couple of years, she and that team had formed Carrington’s construction group, and Altman eventually made it her exclusive area of practice after handling cases ranging from business disputes to antitrust and securities litigation.

“It’s the projects underneath the disputes that are fascinating to me,” she says. “And it’s a team sport. Big construction disputes set you up for a lot of collaboration, within your law firm, with clients, and with engineers and cost experts. You pull together a lot of people from different disciplines and learn to speak the same language.”

The high-ceilinged, suburban farmhouse in Midlothian where she lives with her husband, Dan, a civil litigator, is just 25 miles southwest of Dallas’ glossy skyline, but it feels worlds away. As Altman recounts the power plant case, her narration is punctuated by the distant squawking of chickens—just part of the “menagerie of critters” that keeps her grounded and connected to her childhood. 

Altman’s early years were spent on roughly 10,000 acres of farmland in rural Zimbabwe, where her father and uncle raised cattle and pigs and grew tobacco and maize. Four generations earlier, her people came from their native Wales.

She was in eighth grade when her parents suddenly informed her and her two siblings that they were moving to the United States. The Zimbabwe government was imposing increasingly stricter limits on taking money out of the country. Realizing their children would probably disperse across the world for their higher education, and facing uncertainties ahead, Altman’s parents opted to start over in a country where everyone might stay closer together.

They walked away from 15 square miles of farmland with a few suitcases and the $1,500 they were allowed to take with them. The family settled in Shelbyville, between Lexington and Louisville in rural Kentucky, finding work on a tobacco and dairy farm.

“I remember appreciating for the first time just how much my parents sacrificed of their own financial security and comfort to start with nothing and three kids in a strange land,” Altman says. “They were so very right about the doors it opened for all of us.”

At the time, though, Altman, whose life revolved around her horses, was heartbroken. But the cousins she’d grown up with had moved to Kentucky a couple of years earlier; they helped her adjust. And while her new classmates thought she talked funny, the benefit of speaking a common language eased assimilation.

It wasn’t long before Altman was knocking on the door at a nearby Arabian horse farm, begging the owners to let her spend time with their horses. “They paid me two bucks an hour to clean the horse stalls,” she says. “I loved it.”

Tobacco farming in Kentucky was hard work, and occasionally dangerous: One summer, Altman’s little brother developed green tobacco sickness, a form of nicotine poisoning that causes nausea and vomiting, after a morning spent trimming wet tobacco plants.

By then, Altman was at Vanderbilt University, where a senior year business law class prompted her to pursue law school at the University of Kentucky. That class, along with her logic and philosophy courses, told her that “structuring arguments was something I was good at and enjoyed,” she says.

Altman joined Carrington Coleman right out of law school after doing a clerkship with the firm in Dallas the summer before. She’s now a partner, having been with the firm 30 years. “I’m a lifer,” she says.

The late Jim Coleman, a founding partner of the firm, was someone she aspired to be like. He was “not just an exceptional lawyer but an exceptional person,” she says, noting his pioneering hires of female attorneys starting in the 1970s. “He was way ahead of his time in recognizing that women could be really good lawyers. … I practiced law with Jim for a number of years and forever kept his voicemail when my mom died and he called to express his condolences.”

Altman’s cases have involved everything from highways and bridges to energy projects and drinking-water facilities. Her major clients are public entities whose projects have connected her to other public entities. 

“Those projects intersect a lot,” she says. “Utilities are located along tollways, so there’s a lot of commonalities.”

Meanwhile, Altman’s role as a board member for Texas’ Trinity River Authority, which oversees development of surface water resources across a river basin extending over 37 counties, gives her insight into the political and stewardship issues behind such projects.

“She’s become my go-to for construction and engineering issues,” says Elaine Rodriguez, general counsel for Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, who has worked with Altman for nearly a decade.

Disputes with engineering firms, she notes, “can be complex because of the interplay between who designed it, who engineered it, who built it—was it the quality of materials or the design? It can get pretty gnarly, and she has a great way of cutting through it and getting down to the brass tacks.”

Gene Gamez, general counsel for Dallas Area Rapid Transit, got to know Altman after she was brought in to help the transit authority negotiate construction of a 26-mile light rail line extending through three North Texas counties. When the pandemic threatened to sidetrack the $2 billion megaproject midstream, he says, Altman helped the board devise a plan to keep it moving forward and hold contractors to commitments. The line is now 90% complete.

He praises Altman’s ability to adjust and keep her cool—a quality that Gamez, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, values. It’s a trait he believes she hones through life on her farm, recalling a story she once related about tending to a severely injured animal. “You need to stay calm when everything is chaotic,” he says. “That’s what she’s really good at.” 

“There’s so many layers to her,” says Carolina Donis, a Guatemalan-born leadership consultant based in Grapevine who got to know Altman through a local leadership initiative. They bonded in part because of their shared immigrant experience.

“She’s not just a lawyer,” Donis says. “She also knows what it’s like to live in different cultures and understand different points of view. She’s always willing to learn, and that is one of her strengths—she really wants to understand where you’re at.”

Altman is proud that her work leaves her prints on the structures and services that North Texans use on a regular basis. That hit home in October 2021 when she picked up her brother, visiting from Kentucky, at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

“I drove him to my downtown Dallas office, and between the start and end of that drive, he saw probably 10 big litigation matters I had handled,” she says. “I had done work at the airport, on the roads we were on, at the county facilities we drove by.” Although, she allows, “I may have done a little detour to get a couple of other things in.”

Altman is well aware that her work affects people’s pocketbooks. “Every wasted dollar that doesn’t justly go where it’s supposed to, I’m paying for it,” she says. “If public entities aren’t well represented when disputes happen, we’re all paying. … It’s our taxes and tolls.”

That philosophy drives her pro bono work as well. Last year, Altman helped settle a dispute between a North Texas social service nonprofit that had just finished a new facility and a contractor who felt entitled to more money. “The project hadn’t gone as smoothly as hoped,” she says.

It wasn’t easy getting everyone on the same page: “You had to really peel back the layers.”  

“I was able to advocate so we reached a settlement that allowed a significant amount of money to stay with the nonprofit for their mission,” she says. “Those monies have to go toward making a difference in people’s lives. It’s one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in the last couple of years.”

Life on the Farm

The 20-acre farm that Cathy Altman calls home unfurls at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that’s blossomed around it in the fast-growing Dallas suburb of Midlothian.

She and Dan have four horses, 40 pygmy goats and a collection of peafowl, chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys. There is a sprinkling of cats, and four working dogs protect the barnyard critters. “We had a donkey for that,” Altman says, “but the donkey fell in love with a horse and got distracted.”

Altman fell for North Texas the summer she did her clerkship with Carrington Coleman; it reminded her of rural Zimbabwe: “It has the feel of Africa, that open green that turns brown when it’s hot, the scattering of trees along the edges.”

The couple have three children, ages 18 to 26. Their oldest son is pursuing a doctorate at Wichita State University; their daughter is enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Their youngest son just started college at Wichita State.

When they moved in 20 years ago, the connecting road was a country lane where people rode horses. “The horses would poop in the road, and nobody would care,” Dan says with a laugh. “Now that it’s a suburb, you have to clean up the poop.”

Another reason they chose to live in a small town was to play a meaningful role in their community. “Dan wanted to be involved in planning and zoning, and I wanted to get involved on the parks board,” says Altman, who has also served as president of the Midlothian Chamber of Commerce.

Her “off” time is spent growing antique roses and tending to the animals. She doesn’t see her farm existence so much as coming full circle as she views the years spent otherwise as “that little gap in my life where I didn’t live on a farm,” she says. 

It’s a life that keeps her grounded. 

“Sometimes you do big-deal things as a lawyer, and you can get a little full of yourself,” she says. “Then you come home and have to rescue a goat stuck in the fence, and you just kind of go, ‘Eh, you’re not that special.’”