Brad was born and raised in Selah, Washington.  He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Puget Sound in 1984 with degrees in American History and English Literature.  He then attended Cornell Law School, graduating in 1987 after serving as Articles Editor for the Cornell Law Review. He won several scholarships while at Cornell, as well as the moot court competition, and was awarded the Rieff Prize for the outstanding student note published in Volume 87 of the Cornell Law Review. 

After law school, Brad clerked with the Hon. Charles R. Richey of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, where, among other things, he was the law clerk responsible for managing the then-largest criminal case in the District’s history.

After his clerkship, Brad joined Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC. As a young lawyer with the firm, he worked on a broad range of matters, from transactional work to antitrust and securities litigation to restructuring and insolvency matters.  In 1992, Brad moved from Arnold & Porter to Hunton & Williams (working in its Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia offices). He became a partner in 1995, specializing in restructuring and insolvency litigation. 

Family matters led Brad to return to the Pacific Northwest in 2005, where he joined Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle, again specializing in insolvency matters and related litigation, but with an expanded focus on a broader range of commercial matters.  In 2015, Brad and a colleague joined Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson in Seattle to help expand that firm’s insolvency practice.  In 2022, Brad and several colleagues left Hillis to help establish the new Seattle office of Snell & Wilmer, a national firm headquartered in Phoenix.

With that project complete, and after recently relocating from the Snoqualmie Valley to Whidbey Island (with Cheryl, his wife of 37 years, and mother of their four now-adult children), Brad has chosen to take advantage of some of the freedom that comes with the final stages of his career by doing something that he has long wanted to do. He has stepped away from big firm life. He has done this with the intention of doing the work he wants to do, the way he wants to do it, for clients that matter to him – while being responsible to no one but himself, the clients, and the work.

Brad has never cared much for the perks and politics of big firm life.  His passion has always been the quality of the work.  He has tried at every stage of his career to internalize something one of Arnold & Porter’s legendary partners, Dennis Lyons, said to him in 1988, not long after he started with the firm: 

“Everything you say or write as a lawyer says something about you, about who you are, and about the things that matter to you . . . so do what you do well, every single time you do it.”