The Teacher Retirement System of Texas is the largest public pension fund in Texas and the sixth largest in the United States. With offices in Austin and London, TRS has diversified assets totaling more than $155 billion and serves 1.5 million public education members and retirees. It also runs the two largest health care plans, outside of Medicaid, for the state of Texas.

Carolina de Onís is the system's general counsel.

Legal Team

de Onís oversees a legal department of 30, including 17 lawyers, as well as TRS' compliance department.

“With $155 billion in assets, we can't do it all in-house, but we try to keep as much in-house as we can,” she said. “As a general rule, we can do it better, faster and most cost-effectively in-house.”

A substantial majority of the pension work is done in-house, while less investment work is kept in, although even in those agreements, “we keep a pretty strong hand because our value-add is knowing the client and making sure that outside counsel understands what we need,” de Onís said.

Outside Counsel

For investment counsel, de Onís turns to: DLA Piper; Foley & Lardner; Foster Pepper; Jackson Walker; Katten Muchin Rosenman; Purrington Moody Weil; Seyfarth Shaw; and Squire Patton Boggs. For pension, tax and health care work, she uses Ice Miller.

Daily Duties

“I spend a lot of time working with my team: training the team, managing the team and supervising the team,” de Onís said. “I have a hand in the major legal decisions that need to be made, but I do like to delegate where I can.”

de Onís also sets the strategic direction of the legal and compliance departments, noting that when she started at TRS, there was no official compliance department, so she created one “out of whole cloth within the legal department.”

In addition to advising the governor-appointed board of trustees, de Onís also sits on both the internal investment and pension management committees.

“It's an interesting job because I have the investment side, I have the pension side, I have the health care side, and then I have all of the regular corporate-type duties,” de Onís said, adding that these include labor and employment, litigation, contracts and ethics and compliance work.

“What really takes up most of my time is the investment side because the legal issues there tend to be thornier,” she said.

Route to the Top

After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law in 1996, de Onís clerked for two years for Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in Austin.

A fluent Spanish speaker, de Onís then spent six years as a high-stakes associate litigator in the New York office of Davis Polk & Wardwell, representing a number of Spanish and Latin American companies.

She then joined Barclays Investment Bank, where she was responsible for litigation, including the litigation that resulted from the financial crisis, as well as litigation related to Barclays' acquisition of Lehman Bros.' capital markets and investment banking businesses following the investment bank's bankruptcy in 2008.

de Onís then took a year off to have children and return to Austin, where she joined TRS as GC in 2013.

The position “is a nice mix of my Wall Street background with a public service component,” she said.

Personal

de Onís and her French husband have two daughters, ages 9 and 7. The family loves to travel, including returning to France whenever possible. de Onís also enjoys spending time with her children and living the Austin lifestyle, including being outdoors.

Last Book

“Nemesis,” by Philip Roth, a novel that tells of a summer 1944 polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children.