"Great vision without
great people is irrelevant."
- Jim Collins
LEADERSHIP
BRAD BRUNER
Founder and Principal
Email: brad @ towerlegal .com
Tel: 888 - 869 - 3749 (888 - TOWER49)
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
Brad has developed a unique and highly successful legal recruiting practice that encompasses both top-flight in-house legal recruiting and sophisticated law-firm recruiting of individuals, teams and whole-firm M&A. He also has many years of experience growing successful internal organizations and teams. Brad has been frequently quoted in prominent publications such as GC Magazine, Forbes and The Recorder. He has hosted/served as a panelist on numerous national/international roundtables for prominent legal executives.
A Harvard Law School graduate and Fulbright Scholar who also earned his Masters and Bachelors degrees from Stanford University, Brad originally practiced law at an AmLaw 50 firm and served as an in-house director of legal affairs. He speaks several languages, and he has worked in a number of countries and on both U.S. coasts. He began legal recruiting over 15 years ago and has been fortunate enough to hone his skills in a number of different top legal markets in the U.S. and abroad. This unique combination of experience gives him a particularly expansive perspective in his work.
Before co-founding Tower Legal Executive Search, Brad most recently served as Managing Partner, East Region and Leader of the In-House Practice Group at an international legal recruiting firm. During his tenure he not only played a key role in many prominent partner, group and GC placements. He also spearheaded the company's growth in opening successful offices in the eastern U.S. and in Texas so that the firm's East Region headcount grew from zero to equal that of all other existent offices.
Brad had previously served as Managing Partner of West Coast Recruiting and National In-House Practice Leader for many years at another prominent U.S. legal search firm based in the eastern U.S. He also worked significantly in major middle-US markets (across Texas, Chicago, Ohio and more) during his tenure there. Brad originally started his legal recruiting career in the S.F. Bay Area, where he had also practiced law in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
EDUCATION
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J.D., Harvard Law School
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M.A., Stanford University
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B.A., Stanford University
EXTENDED PRACTICE OVERVIEW
A seasoned big-firm attorney and in-house senior counsel, Brad has developed a unique and highly successful legal recruiting practice that encompasses both a top-flight in-house recruiting practice and a sophisticated law-firm recruiting practice. A Fulbright Scholar and Harvard Law graduate who also earned both his Masters and Bachelors degrees from Stanford University, Brad speaks several languages and has lived and worked in a number of countries.
Brad regularly immerses himself in specialized subject matter areas as he partners with his diverse clientele. Recent search areas have included high-tech hardware devices, bio-pharma transactions and compliance, cyber-security, energy, real-estate finance, public-securities reporting, swap-dealer compliance, state & local taxation, and medical-device regulatory regimes.
Corporations call Brad to help them fill their most important in-house legal hiring needs. Brad’s long-term clients include some of the most recognizable global technology, bio-pharmaceutical, banking, finance, investment and real estate corporations. He has helped some grow their legal groups from single to triple-digit headcounts. Brad has had an outstanding track record placing General Counsels and other senior legal executives (including Legal VPs, Deputy General Counsels, International Legal Department heads and their equivalents) at corporations throughout the U.S. and in many ex-US jurisdictions. He is also adept at identifying Chief Compliance Officers, Heads of Public Policy, IP and other senior-level positions that may fall outside companies’ legal departments yet still require substantive legal backgrounds.
On the law-firm side of his practice, Brad routinely works on both complex retained and targeted contingent-fee searches to identify individual partners, teams and other senior attorneys. His clients span the full spectrum of firms, from the most prominent firms recognizable by single-names to promising boutiques and savvy mid-size firms. He has achieved a strong reputation for helping his clients to be among the first to pioneer emerging new legal markets and achieve great results there.
An extrovert with a passion for detail and remaining current in multiple markets, Brad is as comfortable discussing and negotiating the legal intricacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Southern California legal markets as he is those of Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Dallas or Pittsburgh.
Prior to becoming a legal recruiter in the early 2000s, Brad practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area offices of top firms Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Fenwick & West LLP. At Orrick, he practiced corporate/finance law for public companies and large concerns before moving laterally to Fenwick & West, where he focused his practice more on corporate, commercial and technology transactions work for technology companies. Brad was then recruited into the vibrant Silicon Valley “dot-com boom” technology scene as a Corporate Counsel for Yahoo! Inc. Brad continued his in-house career as Director of Legal Affairs for GetThere L.P., an online business travel software company for several years before finally transitioning into legal recruiting. Brad’s experience practicing law within both law-firm and in-house legal departments has greatly informed his ability to understand the complexities of each area as well as to recognize the cross-currents between the two as they bear on both his clients and candidates.
EXTENDED EDUCATIONAL AND PERSONAL BACKGROUND
A Tennessee native, Brad went cross-country to study at Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with double majors in International Relations and Italian Studies. During his college summers, he twice attended Middlebury College’s intensive language schools. Prior to graduating, he studied abroad in both Italy and Germany, earned a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship to study at the University of Regensburg (Germany), and he also taught English in Prague through one of the first U.S. student-teaching programs to enter Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
After earning a Masters degree in German Studies from Stanford as well, Brad returned for another year in Berlin, Germany as a Fulbright Scholar and teacher. Brad then spent a year teaching and planning academic conferences at the University of Vermont before he decided to study law.
Brad studied at Harvard Law School, where he was very active as a senior editor on the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, as a participant in HLS’ highly-respected Program for Negotiation, and as both a participant and assistant in HLS’ Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Brad has retained his fluency in both German and Italian, and he is not afraid to break out his somewhat rusty Spanish or his fairly rudimentary Czech, French or Swedish as needed. Brad reserves time every year for charitable activities that range from volunteering at local food banks to serving on the boards of both local and international charitable organizations. In addition to travel, Brad also counts water activities (including kayaking and diving), writing, reading and an increasingly serious interest in photography as some of his favorite personal activities.
