Jennifer Slack Joins Cooke County Attorney's Office as Assistant

Jennifer Slack is now listed as assistant Cooke County attorney on the county attorney office's official web page, serving under County Attorney Edmund J. Zielinski. The office she joins prosecutes adult misdemeanor and juvenile cases for the county and advises the Commissioners Court, county department heads and other elected officials, according to that page, which also says it cannot give residents legal advice on private matters.

Slack's official county biography traces her career to the Lubbock County Criminal District Attorney's Office, where she started as an assistant district attorney. The biography says she handled misdemeanor and felony cases through 12 years in the criminal division, with about a decade of that time spent prosecuting family-violence cases and helping victims seek protective orders.

She then moved to Lubbock County's civil division for five years, the biography says. As legal counsel there, she advised department heads and elected officials and took on contracts, Public Information Act requests, expunctions and county civil litigation in state and federal courts. The same biography lists her as a former vice chair of the South Plains Association of Governments Criminal Justice Advisory Committee.

Slack relocated to Cooke County in 2024 and opened a private practice covering criminal defense, expunctions, probate, guardianship and family-law work, the county page says. It states that she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Texas Tech University in 2001 and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the Texas Tech School of Law in 2006.

Cooke County splits its prosecution duties between two offices. Under the typical Texas arrangement described by the Texas Association of Counties, county attorneys prosecute Class A and B misdemeanors while district attorneys prosecute felonies, and criminal district attorneys can take all levels of state criminal cases. The county keeps a separate district attorney's office, whose mission statement says it prosecutes felony offenses within its jurisdiction.

That office is led by District Attorney John Warren, with Barron Slack listed as first assistant district attorney on the county's district attorney page. The page says Barron Slack grew up in Cooke County, graduated from Gainesville High School, attended the Texas Tech School of Law and spent 18 years as an assistant district attorney in Lubbock County, along with work as a special prosecutor for Texas counties.

Zielinski's county biography says he previously worked as general counsel for a nonprofit, as an assistant district attorney in Cooke County and as a justice of the peace. Andrea Townsend, who took the Cooke County Court at Law bench on June 1, 2026, served earlier as an assistant district attorney in several North Texas counties, including Cooke, Tarrant, Denton, Ellis and Grayson, according to her court biography.