Introducing CBA President Jessica Brown, 0720 COBJ, Vol. 49, No. 7 Pg. 4
| Author | BY HALEY HEMEN |
| Position | Vol. 49, 7 [Page 4] |
CBA PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY HALEY HEMEN
Jessica Brown was always going to be a lawyer. Well, that or an actress. "I didn't really know what lawyers did, but law was always in my top two. I dropped the actress idea somewhere along the way, but the lawyer concept stuck, and I went straight from college to law school," says Brown, a partner at Gibson Dunn and the incoming president of the Colorado Bar Association.
Finding a Home in Employment Law
It's been a perfect fit for Brown since the beginning. She joined Gibson Dunn in 1995 after clerking for Judge Jim R. Carrigan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, where employment cases comprised about 40% of the federal court docket. "I got really comfortable with the
McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting framework and learned various avenues for prevailing on summary judgment in those cases. When I joined Gibson Dunn, I reached out to partners in other offices about their employment matters, and soon I was working with lawyers in most of our domestic offices, defending single-plaintiff and class action lawsuits under various state and federal laws."
Gibson Dunn proved an ideal training ground. "I remember feeling like my skill set grew so much every year, which confirmed for me that I was on the right track" She gives a lot of credit to her mentors within the firm. One senior lawyer in the Denver office talked her through deposing an expert and pushed her to create a litigation budget. Another senior employment-law partner in the Orange County office not only let Brown participate as he prepared company executives for their depositions, but also taught her the art of witness preparation. He then introduced her to his employment-law partners, and soon she was working for most of them. She assisted a partner in the D.C. office—a former Solicitor of Labor—with a U.S. Supreme Court case regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act. Just before oral argument, he moved her admission into the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, providing her a front-row seat. A senior partner in the Los Angeles office gave her equal billing on an in-depth paper they wrote on fee-shifting under the federal civil rights statutes, then let her co-present it with him at the prestigious American Employment Law Council conference. He also made a point...
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