BRIAN LEE JOHNSRUD, 53, Managing Partner at Duane Morris, Silicon Valley, California

Practice area: Employment litigation and counseling for companies

Law school and year of graduation: University of Minnesota, 1996

The following has been edited for style.

How long have you been at the firm?

Since October 2022.

What year were you promoted/elected to your current role?

Since October 2023.

Were you a partner at another firm before joining your present firm? If so, which one, how long were you there and when did you leave?

Yes, I was managing partner of the Silicon Valley office of our bicoastal employment defense boutique, Curley, Hurtgen & Johnsrud. I opened that office in October 2009 (leaving my partnership at Morgan Lewis) and remained in that managing partner role until October 2022, when we merged our practice with Duane Morris. It has been a great merger for our team and for our clients, particularly in terms of the national employment law footprint and incredible trial practice group teamwork.

How would you describe your career trajectory (was it organic or an active pursuit)?

It has really been a combination of organic and active pursuit. When I moved to San Francisco in 1996, we were just ramping into the dot-com era. I knew I wanted to do legal work for tech companies and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. From there, I’ve seen rapid changes in the technology and business cycle, including the fall of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, where I was an associate. With many other attorneys, I joined Morgan Lewis and made partner in 2004. While there, I took on leadership roles in hiring, the firm’s technology industry practice, and co- chaired the Trial Academy. At the same time, the entrepreneurial spirit in Silicon Valley helped cause me to want to do a law startup, which led to me starting the California office of our defense boutique (Curley, Hurtgen & Johnsrud). We grew that firm from three attorneys to nearly 20 in a very strategic and disciplined way, generally turning down pitch requests and instead focusing on hard work and long-term relationships. For me, that’s still the most rewarding way to practice: Where you focus on values, not a transaction mindset.

What do you think was the deciding point for the firm in electing/promoting you to your current role? Was it your performance on a specific case? A personality trait? Making connections with the right people?

Duane Morris was kind enough to give me a year off from management responsibility when we joined. That let us get settled in at the firm and also allowed the firm to make sure that we understood and practiced its culture and values. I can tell you that Duane Morris takes its culture and values very seriously, which is refreshing and rewarding. The firm invests so much in its people. It is one of the few firms that still brings all its lawyers from every level (from first-year associate to senior partners) together in person once a year—and in 2023 more than 80% of attorneys attended in person—and then also has a separate annual partner meeting.

What unique challenges do you face as it relates to your role?

Duane Morris has been in San Francisco for more than 25 years, and we are continuing to work on raising the firm’s profile in Silicon Valley.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve done a lot here in Palo Alto. In the fall of 2022, 13 of us joined this office and, since then, we’ve attracted several lateral partners as well as new attorneys who added new capabilities to our office. I’m pleased to say we’ve also promoted from within and that we can offer new attorneys a wide range of career opportunities. And we continue to hire to meet client demand.

Our post-pandemic environment, where life seems paced at 24/7, really makes it challenging to separate work life from personal life. One of my responsibilities as managing partner is to make sure I encourage a culture in the office that prioritizes not just dedication to clients but also to our own wellness.

What’s the best piece of advice you give to someone who wants to rise up the ranks to lead an office?

Law is still fundamentally an apprenticeship profession, both in practice and leadership. If you want to lead an office someday, first be a good follower and good firm citizen. I’d recommend getting involved in the various functions of a law firm, from recruiting to marketing to pro bono to operations, while of course working hard and developing your practice. And I recommend watching and learning from how well-regarded leaders are handling both client matters and firm matters (and similarly learn what “not to do” from less effective leaders). Personally, I’d be wary of someone actively campaigning for a managing partner role. Ideally, your peers would recognize organically that you are the right person to lead the office at that time. And I would tell them to be committed to making the office better than they found it, even in some small way, which is one of my challenges since my predecessor, Steve Sutro, did an incredible job both grounding and growing the Silicon Valley office.

Who had the greatest influence in your career that helped propel you to your current role?

My professional career was long encouraged by my dad, who was a lifelong farmer. While not formally educated beyond high school, he had a deft sense of common sense, which he told me I couldn’t learn in school. Throughout my career and his life, we talked about my cases—what I planned to argue and what the other side’s position would be—and my dad accurately called the outcome of every single case, both won and lost. When we had a tough case, he would say “I’m glad I’m not the judge, I’d have to rule against you.”

In the legal world, I’ve been fortunate to have a great mentor in Mike Curley. We started to work together nearly 20 years ago and it has been elbow to elbow ever since. He’s an incredible lawyer with an unparalleled work ethic. On the hardest cases, you want Mike Curley either leading or on the team. Mike leads by example and, over time, he showed me how build something. Together, we built an amazing boutique firm and when it came time to figure out what to do next, we agreed that Duane Morris was the right place to take us to the next phase of our careers.

How do you utilize technology to benefit the firm/practice and/or business development?

Obviously, technology helps moves things along in business development. While this may be controversial to say from Silicon Valley, if I could uninvent email, I would. When we were starting our own firm, word of mouth and personal relationship building were the big drivers. A client would recommend us to another company and it took off from there. That’s still true today. I firmly believe in the value of old fashioned, face-to-face interactions.

Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger self and/or what would you do differently?

I would recognize that work/life balance is pretty elusive for everyone (including me) and that there are times when you just have to prioritize a true disconnect from work in order to come back stronger and more efficient. And if you don’t, you risk burnout—so be serious about taking care of yourself as well as your team and clients.

Do you have a prediction on how the legal industry will evolve over the next several years?

I’ve been working and living in Silicon Valley for 25 years. We have all seen technology continue to evolve and change all industries, including law. But in the end, this is a relationship business and clients will call lawyers they trust with their hardest and most pressing questions and they won’t just want a computer-generated answer. They will want a curated answer that takes into consideration their business dynamic at that time, industry trends, and the personality of those involved.

Please share with us any firm or industry initiatives that you are working on as well as the impact you hope to achieve.

Earlier this year, our office hosted a unique client event: an in-person briefing on the impact of generative AI on a workforce, touching on employment, privacy (including employee privacy), and IP. Of course, we have the technology available to have offered this via Zoom—we’re in the technology capital of the world—but we decided to hold this session in person. We developed a cross-platform program that would provide useful information on a range of topics and we had more than three dozen clients attend. These were high-ranking corporate counsel and executives who made the time to be there. This illustrated the power of personal relationships: They create opportunities to go beyond what we can simply see on our own.

What career advice do you wish more people would ask you? (e.g. ”if you just listened to me you could have…”)

As a law firm leader, what impact would you like to have on your firm and/or the legal industry as a whole?

Clients are understandably focused on efficiencies, both operationally and with outside counsel. There has to be a balance between the perception of getting the best possible deal on legal services and actually getting top-quality legal support. In that regard, I believe some companies are going to have to think differently on how procurement and legal operations teams support practicing in-house lawyers.

Increasingly, we are seeing procurement teams exercise outsized influence on attorney retention when they have no direct responsibility to manage the legal work or accountability for the outcome. These teams can certainly add value in identifying potential resource savings and billing, though sometimes may not fully factor in the quality of work over the long term and other hidden efficiencies that certain lawyers can bring to bear.

Believe me, we are all for rate efficiencies and have no issue discussing creative approaches to rates with clients, including alternative fees—we do that every day. I am, though, reminded of the sign that was hung in my favorite local bike shop: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.” ―Benjamin Franklin.

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