Tufts University – Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, English and History, 1983
Duke University School of Law – Juris Doctor, 1986
Upon graduating from law school in 1986, I joined Wiggin & Dana in New Haven, Connecticut, a prestigious regional law firm with deep New England roots. I served as an associate of the firm for six years, until 1992. It was there I cut my teeth as a professional and learned my trade from some of the finest lawyers in the country. For several years I served as one of two associates on the firm’s Hiring Committee and in that capacity helped shape the firm’s rapid expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1992 I was recruited by Neuberger, Quinn, Gielen, Rubin & Gibber, then a small but dynamically growing firm in Baltimore with a boutique corporate and real estate practice. As the firm’s senior associate for corporate and transactional matters, I gained invaluable experience negotiating numerous complex transactions opposite some of the largest firms in the mid-Atlantic. I was lucky to work closely with one of the drafters of the Maryland Limited Liability Company Act as the LLC form emerged in the 1990s, starting largely in Maryland, as the entity of choice for many businesses and holding companies.
In 1997 I joined the legal team at Sylvan Learning Systems, the nation’s leading K-12 tutoring company, in Baltimore. At Sylvan I led the in-house team responsible for an IPO that raised $170 million in initial capital for Caliber Learning Network, a cutting-edge distance learning company and Sylvan subsidiary. After helping take Caliber public, I served as the company’s general counsel, reporting directly to senior management and the board. Among other duties, I was responsible for negotiating and developing innovative contracts in the field of educational technology, and for advising the company and its managers on a broad range of internal corporate matters, including reporting and compliance under the Securities Act of 1934.
My in-house experience at Sylvan and Caliber was invaluable. Contacts I made during this time are clients to this day, or have led directly to other clients. That said, I found I missed the variety of private practice, especially representing different clients confronting needs and challenges across different verticals. In 1999, I therefore made the difficult decision to go out on my own, counting Sylvan and Caliber among my first corporate clients. The rest, as they say, is history.
I was born and raised in Connecticut close to the law and lawyers. My mother, the Honorable Frederica S. Brenneman, among the first female graduates of Harvard Law School, served as a Connecticut Superior Court judge for twenty-five years. My father, the late Russell L. Brenneman, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent environmental lawyers before retiring in 1994 from full-time practice as a partner with Murtha Cullina in Hartford, where he founded the firm’s environmental practice group. My sister, Amy Brenneman, is an actress based in Los Angeles with numerous TV and film credits, most recently a starring ensemble role in HBO’s hit series The Leftovers. I’m a published poet whose poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nebraska Review, and The Sewanee Theological Review and elsewhere.
