‘You Will Not Outwork Her’

Nina Cortell entered the Supreme Court of Texas on a March morning in 2003, ready to continue the fight in a case that would increase funding for Texas public schools.

At the time, school districts were allowed to levy local property taxes, up to a cap, to fund their maintenance and operations costs. Nearly half of the districts—representing about 60% of the public school students—were taxing at the $1.50 statutory cap. Roughly two-thirds—or 80% of the student population—were taxing at, or within, 5 cents of the cap. The districts argued that state-mandated standards, a lack of state financial support, demographic trends and unfunded mandates had forced them to tax at that level—depriving them of meaningful discretion over their tax rate and thereby transforming these local taxes into a de facto unconstitutional state property tax.

Cortell’s firm, Haynes and Boone, had filed the case on behalf of several school districts with the objective of increasing much-needed financing. But the trial court promptly dismissed the case over procedural issues, and that ruling was affirmed on appeal. It was now the job of Cortell and her colleagues to persuade the high court to allow the case to go forward. 

The state was represented by future Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeff Boyd, among others, and the two sides volleyed over the particulars that would ultimately affect the quality of education for Texas’ 4.2 million public school students. In Cortell’s closing argument to the court, she made one final point, informed by her Jewish heritage, to emphasize the need to make access to quality education more equitable.

“I know this is not easy for this court, but I do want to share with you some Jewish wisdom, if I might, from Pirkei Avot,” she told the justices. “‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from trying.’ The schoolchildren of this state require this court’s attention.”

Two months later, the court agreed with Cortell’s position and reinstated the case for trial. And two years after that, Cortell’s firm was again arguing before the state Supreme Court. The court agreed with her again, ruling that school-related property taxes had essentially become an unconstitutional state property tax. And following this ruling, the Legislature created new funding streams that increased state financial support for the maintenance and operations of Texas’ school districts, infusing into the system additional financial capacity in excess of $2 billion.

“To be involved in litigation that could benefit all the children in public schools was very meaningful,” says Cortell. “As a first-generation American, my public schools were extraordinarily important to me and provided an educational base that prepared me well for the years that followed. I feel a great debt of gratitude.”

To this day, Cortell is tickled to have cited the Pirkei Avot, an ancient Jewish text, in the school finance case.

Like many German-Jewish immigrants who escaped but lost family in the Holocaust, Cortell’s parents spoke little of their experience as she grew up. Only later would they share the details about how her maternal grandparents had fled to France after Germany’s invasion of Luxembourg—where they hid until they were captured by Nazis in May 1944, just before D-Day, and were murdered at Auschwitz.

As a teen, Cortell’s mother, Anneliese Feibel, worked as a nanny for a family whose Munich apartment overlooked the block on which Adolf Hitler lived. The boy she nannied for would grow up to write a book called Hitler, My Neighbor, while Feibel eventually fled to London—and then to Dallas—to reunite with her brother. It was there that she met Cortell’s father, Walter Kocherthaler, on a blind date in 1949.

Kocherthaler, who came to the U.S. in the 1930s, changed his name to Cortell to accommodate American pronunciation challenges. He had been a “Ritchie Boy,” one of about 20,000 German-Jewish refugees recruited to serve as U.S. Army intelligence officers in World War II due to their knowledge of the German language, culture, and geography. It wasn’t until Cortell saw a 2023 60 Minutes segment about them that she realized this was likely her father’s role.

By then, the names of those who’d served had been declassified; when she searched for her father’s name, there it was. “I knew my dad was in intelligence, but hadn’t had the frame of him being part of this really impressive group that did important work during the war,” Cortell says. “He interrogated prominent POWs.”

After the war, he was a traveling salesman who sold women’s clothing throughout West Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, often leaving the family’s Dallas home on a Monday morning and not returning until Friday night. “I traveled with him during the summers for one or two weeks and got a great sense of small-town America in that time period,” says Cortell, adding that he died when she was 19. “It was a different era, and one I look back on fondly.”

Cortell’s parents instilled in their two daughters a great love for the United States as well as a sense of humanitarianism. As a liberal arts major at the University of Texas at Austin looking to further her education, Cortell considered several public service paths—education, social work and law. 

“I was taught that it is our responsibility to give back and make the world a better place,” Cortell says. “You want to leave the world in a better place than you found it.”

As she considered where her future might lead, Cortell sat in on a first-year property law class taught by esteemed professor Stanley Johanson, who presented the students with a challenge. “The scenario was that a meteorite had fallen onto some farmland. Who was entitled to keep the meteorite—the person who found it, or the person who owned the land?” Cortell says. “I was hooked. And I knew within weeks of starting law school that I was where I needed to be.”

As part of a generation in which women were 10% to 15% of law school graduates, Cortell, now 74, encountered a difficult climate. “There was a reluctance by firms to hire women,” she recalls. “While I’ve always been indebted to Haynes and Boone for many things, one is having the courage and vision to hire a woman.”

She earned a summer clerkship at Haynes and Boone in 1975, the same year Judge Barbara Lynn and other law students at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University sued several firms for gender discrimination. “Judge Lynn later became our first female chief judge for the Northern District of Texas,” Cortell says. “She and I started practice the same year.”

That year was 1976, when Cortell became the first woman—and just the 13th lawyer overall—hired at Haynes and Boone. Six years later, she was its first female partner. What was then a small firm now employs 700-plus lawyers in 20 offices globally, and the lobby of its 23rd-floor headquarters features stunning floor-to-ceiling views of the Dallas skyline. Cortell’s more modest office features photos of her husband—physician Robert Fine, with whom she recently celebrated a 50th wedding anniversary—as well as their three daughters and five grandchildren.

She recalls attending events in those early days at Dallas’ prestigious City Club. “Women could not sit in the main dining room,” Cortell says. “You’d go through the buffet line and then go to a nice, but smaller, room, where the women would sit with any male guests. There were a lot of downtown clubs where business meetings were held but women were not given access. I know barriers still exist, but the landscape is so utterly different now that it’s hard to imagine those times.”

Most trial lawyers handled their own appeals back then, but Cortell immediately found such appellate work compelling. “I love working through what the law is, and what it should be,” she says. 

In the late ’80s, about the time Texas made the practice a certified specialty, Haynes and Boone’s George Bramblett lobbied the firm to launch an appellate group. Cortell credits the charismatic litigator with helping shape her career, and the group now has two dozen lawyers.

“She’s an appellate pioneer in the state of Texas,” says firm partner Ben Mesches, who first met Cortell when he was a summer associate in 2000. “She understood there was a certain skillset 

that could be brought to [this practice]. There were few jurisdictions in the U.S. where there were true appellate specialists. This was the beginning.”

Anne Johnson, who spent 26 years at Haynes and Boone and is now head of the U.S. appellate team for Norton Rose Fulbright in Dallas, was immediately assigned to Cortell out of law school in 1995.

“Nina really raised me as a lawyer,” she says. “I still draw on the leadership principles she employed and think about things she did to attract and retain talent. She’s an extraordinarily talented lawyer, a team player and a team builder. It’s rare to see all those skills in one person.”

Since the early appellate days, Cortell has notched significant victories on behalf of clients like ExxonMobil, AT&T and Matador Resources Co., with wins for the latter earning her one of her favorite professional souvenirs: vials of oil from wells named after her by the energy firm’s founder, Joe Foran. “To this day, I get personal letters from Joe apprising me of the status of the development of the wells,” she says.

Opponents respect her. “She’s a fierce competitor,” says Johnson.“You do not want to be on the other side of Nina Cortell. She likes to win.”

She adds: “You will not outwork her. Nobody will. She was never one of those leaders who let the minions do the work. She was always deep in the weeds, involved in everything.”

In 2006, when incoming Texas State Bar president Martha Dickie sought someone to lead a task force on attracting and retaining women and minorities, she tapped Cortell, knowing she would be able to lead a group that included prominent managing partners and the general counsel for Shell USA. “You have to have somebody who commands their respect,” says Dickie, now a partner at ABDM Law in Austin. “She’s kind of a rock star. She’s tough, but everybody loves her.”

Under Cortell, the task force produced a report making the business case for diversity. Among other actions, it suggested the state Bar make diversity part of its mission statement and develop diversity education programs for law firms.

Around the same time, as part of a 30th anniversary law school reunion, Cortell and other female graduates discussed how to help move the needle forward for their modern counterparts. Thus began several years of intense planning and evaluation culminating in the 2009 opening of the Center for Women in Law at the University of Texas’ School of Law in Austin.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had recently retired, attended the center’s inaugural launch and served as keynote speaker. “I got to be with her in a small group setting,” Cortell says. “She was so inspiring. I’ll never forget it.”

Among other services, the center advocates for female lawyers in areas such as workplace flexibility and opportunity, helps them negotiate law firm dynamics, and provides a hub for discussion about ways to promote recruitment, retention and advancement. “We wanted to do something that would inspire them and help them navigate their careers,” Cortell says. “I’m proud to say the center has had a wonderful history. I’m enormously proud of that achievement.”

Cortell is quick to say she hasn’t done it alone; Johnson says that mindset is one reason she’s beloved by colleagues. “I still run into people who’ll ask about my background, and when I say I worked with Nina, everyone is like, ‘Oh—I love Nina,’” Johnson says. “She’s just this deeply kind and good person.”

She pauses suddenly, a catch in her voice.

“With Nina, it was always about the team. She would describe us all as these amazing people, and I would think—‘Oh my God, I’m not all of that but I want to be, now that she’s said it that way.’ And when we’d win a case, Nina would get kudos from the clients, and her first reaction would be, ‘Oh, it was the team.’ For someone as accomplished and brilliant as she is, that’s so rare.”

It’s All Relative

Scholars of Albert Einstein know that space, time, and motion are all relative. But for Nina Cortell, Einstein actually was a relative. “My father’s mother was a close friend and distant cousin,” she says.

When Cortell’s parents married in Dallas in 1949, they visited Einstein at Princeton University, her father having no other relatives in the United States. The visit is a family legend: Cortell’s father, Walter, had requested that his wife, Anneliese, tone down her vivacious personality upon meeting the physicist. “But of course she doesn’t,” Cortell says with a laugh. “In the middle of it, Einstein gets up and leaves the room, and she’s worried that she’s done something to offend.”

Instead, Einstein returned with pen and paper, and began to write a letter to Cortell’s paternal grandmother—who had resettled in Montevideo, Uruguay, due to Nazi persecution and who had yet to meet Anneliese. “He wrote very glowingly about her,” Cortell says. “It couldn’t have been nicer.”

The letter is now a framed family heirloom, along with another correspondence—a letter of congratulations sent by Einstein to Cortell’s parents upon her birth. 

Among items the family received in the 1960s was Einstein’s last smoking pipe, which Cortell recalls taking to grade school for show-and-tell. “It’s not that we were totally oblivious that it had some importance, but it wasn’t overly treated that way,” she says. “I mean, my mother let me take it to school.”

Others, however, were awed. Cortell says one classmate caressed the pipe with reverence and said he would never wash his hands again. “Sometimes,” she says, “it takes other people to react for you to realize something has importance.”