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In September 2025, Rudy Rodríguez was awarded the prestigious La Luz Award by the Dallas Hispanic Bar Association during the Noche de Luz gala. The award celebrates leaders who exemplify integrity, mentorship, and service in Dallas’s Hispanic legal community.
“Some of my heroes have received this award before me,” Rodríguez says about the honor. “To be included in their company is incredibly humbling.”
Rudy has spent his entire career in Dallas. It’s where he’s worked, raised his family, and immersed himself in service to his profession and community, including service on the Dallas Zoological Society, the Texas Trees Foundation, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s President’s Advisory Board, and the Patrick E. Higginbotham American Inn of Court. His love for Dallas is rooted in his own personal history and civic engagement with his city. He’s never needed nor wanted to leave the D-Town, and the city has responded in kind.
The evening of Rodríguez’s award, he was surrounded by family and friends from those three-and-a-half decades, including his wife Stacy, who is Deputy Chief of Litigation for the Dallas City Attorney’s Office.. Rodriguez’s recognition continued his family’s legacy: also in attendance were his parents, whose extensive service to their community was recognized in 2017 by the naming of a Denton, Texas middle school in their honor
2025 has been a big year for Rodríguez. In January, he assumed the role of chief legal officer and corporate secretary Dave & Buster’s Entertainment, Inc., the iconic dining and entertainment brand which operates 177 Dave & Buster’s and 64 Main Event locations in 44 states. It was a brand the attorney followed with great interest while he led the legal and human resources teams at CEC Entertainment, Inc., the company behind the Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza brands, for nine years. When the opportunity arose, Rodríguez says he understood the direction the company wanted to head in and felt a natural fit with the leadership team.
It helped that the legal and risk management teams the new CLO took over were “incredibly strong” and that his immediate predecessor, retiring general counsel Bryan McCrory, supported him generously in the transition.
“I’m building on the strong foundation laid by several excellent general counsels who held this position before me,” Rodríguez says. “I feel a great deal of responsibility to preserve what they’ve helped build and move this organization forward. This has definitely been the greatest learning curve I’ve undertaken in my career, but I believe it’s going very well.”
Dave & Buster’s also took on a new CEO in 2025, in former president of KFC US, Tarun Lal. The Yum! Brands veteran, according to Rodríguez, is a strong and empathetic leader with deep QSR experience and a compelling vision for how to improve and expand Dave & Buster’s both in the US and internationally.
“I’m really excited about what we’re doing to overcome some of the headwinds that are prevalent in the industry as a whole right now,” Rodríguez explains. “Location-based entertainment can be a tough business when consumers have less disposable income, and the economic uncertainties continue to persist. But we have a great product and great people who understand how to continue to grow this organization, and we are confident that the conditions we can’t control will eventually improve.”
It is a point of pride for Rodríguez that he is the only member of the Dave & Buster’s leadership team who has spent his entire career in and around Dallas. But he also has never forgotten his nearby hometown of Denton, where he was raised.
In 2014, Rodríguez and a group of friends and classmates created the Denton High School Family Assistance Foundation, which he serves as president and a founding member of the board of directors. Born from a fundraiser to support a classmate facing medical hardship, the foundation has since awarded over $250,000 in micro-grants to current and former Denton High School students, faculty, and staff dealing with sudden financial distress, from medical emergencies to job losses and family tragedies.
“We give a little help when people need it most, so they can get back on their feet,” Rodríguez explains. “The vast majority of the people who come to us for help only come to us once, and I mean that in a positive way. That’s what it’s all about, being there for them in a moment and helping them preserve their dignity and get back to their lives.”
In 2026, Rodríguez and the rest of the board will launch an endowment campaign to help ensure that the foundation will endure into the future.
When the lawyer and leader thinks about his own service, he always refers back to what his parents taught him and his sisters about service, persistence, and caring about something bigger than yourself. It’s a legacy he’s hoping to pass along to his own children today, and it’s a message he communicated in the September 2025 awards ceremony and regularly tells young professionals and community leaders.
“Success doesn’t have to come in a straight line,” the CLO says. “You have to go beyond your comfort zone and, if a goal matters to you, be relentless in pursuing it. But at the end of it all, there is nothing more rewarding than building a legacy, whether that’s for my kids, for my friends, or for the city where I have built my life and career.”
Hilgers PLLC is proud to provide legal services to Dave & Buster’s and we congratulate its Chief Legal Officer, Rudy Rodriguez, on this tremendous, well-deserved honor. Rudy is a pillar of the DFW legal community. With more than 130 lawyers around the country, Hilgers PLLC is the largest female-owned law firm in the USA. The firm provides outstanding legal services to companies from start-ups to the Fortune 500, specializing in commercial litigation, IP litigation, discovery services, corporate, trademarks, and government enforcement and investigations. Hilgers offers the same attorneys and service levels as the AmLaw 50 but at significantly lower cost.
With widely recognized elite teams in finance, litigation, mergers & acquisitions, private equity, restructuring and special situations, employment and real estate, Paul Hastings is a premier law firm providing superior intellectual capital and execution globally to the world’s leading investment banks, asset managers and corporations.
With unquestioned integrity, brilliance, and practicality, Rudy also uses humor to keen effect, often transforming collective anxiety into universal good will. During a particularly challenging board meeting for the Dallas Zoo two decades ago, following an unanticipated chlorine surge in the local water supply, a number of stingrays in an exhibit had been “compromised,” as the Zoological Society’s executive director was relating the sad event . . . in a manner, regrettably at my urging . . . that took delicacy so far as to be misleading. Rudy had the perfect turn of phrase in addressing the situation: “Are you just trying to tell us they became x-rays?”
–Don Glendenning, former Partner and Life-Long Friend of Rudy Rodriguez
Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP is proud to honor Rudy Rodríguez and his impactful career. We worked closely with Rudy when he was Chief Legal Officer at CEC Entertainment, Inc., operator/franchisor of 650 Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza restaurants. He skillfully guided the company’s successful restructuring with a rare mastery of the facts and an ability to navigate complex negotiations, earning him the trust of internal and external stakeholders. His excellent judgment, steady counsel and commitment to fostering respect and inclusion distinguish him as an exceptional lawyer and leader. We are grateful for our enduring partnership.
