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examples in the course. Now, as a consumer of legal services at eBay, Exclusive Resorts, and now at Inspirato, I get really irritated if the law firm sends me someone, or if it’s my own internal resource, who doesn’t know the underlying business. I’m not going to pay for them to learn that. It’s pretty obvious you were heading in the direction of technology law, but how did you end up at Cooley? Because Apple doesn’t hire lawyers out of law school, I knew I needed to go to a firm. Cooley, Fenwick, and Wilson Sonsini were among the California firms that interviewed at UVA. Because I was on Law Review, Cooley interviewed me. I had offers from other firms in northern California but ended up at Cooley for a variety of reasons.
Brad Handler ’95
the business world from a business side. It wasn’t easy to take Darden classes, so nobody did it. But I already had the Wharton background, so tax was a lot easier for me than those without an accounting background. I was also very interested in intellectual property, and eventually practiced primarily in that area. Other than Lillian BeVier, there was no one who taught intellectual property. I took all of Lillian’s classes.
“My hope was that we could create a system for graduates who are counsel at a company or associates coming into a law firm and out meeting with clients, that they have a basic understanding of how business works …”
Does the Law & Business Program address those issues? Yes, absolutely. I’ve been very happy since we started the Law & Technology Program Initiative in 2000. My hope was that we could create a system for graduates who are counsel at a company or associates coming into a law firm and out meeting with clients, that they have a basic understanding of how business works, what a term sheet looks like and what it means, what the difference is between a pre- and a post-money valuation, and how a stock option plan works.
The thing that really brought this to the forefront for me was an antitrust class I took. We were talking about the Hart-ScottRodino Act and its different documents. I raised my hand and asked, “What kind of documents?” And the professor said, “Here’s the definition, here’s what the statute says.” “Okay, I get what the statute says, but what does that mean in a company’s existence, what does it look like?” Nobody knew. Well, it became important to know a year later when I was an associate at Cooley, I was doing a merger between two companies, and they got a Hart-Scott-Rodino review from the FTC and I had to go pull documents. It would’ve really helped if we had better
How did you go from Cooley to eBay? Again, incredibly lucky. I was a second-year associate at Cooley. Every other Friday I had to be there at 8 am for an associates meeting. On one of those Fridays my private line rang at 7:45 in the morning. I picked up the phone, because the only person who has the number is my wife. This woman says, “Hi, are you Brad Handler?” She was a recruiter for eBay. One of the other associates had given her a list of everybody’s private number. She said, “They want to hire someone to run their business development group and they want that person to be a lawyer. Would you be interested?” I met with her and the eBay team, then only about 20 people. Afterwards, they said, “We want to make you a job offer.” I said “Great. What is it?” They said “We want you to run business development.” I said “Thank you for the offer, but you don’t need me to run business development. You actually need a lawyer in house. You guys are going to get crushed if you don’t have a lawyer in house.” They said, “No, we don’t need a lawyer. We have Heller Ehrman.” I said, “That’s not going to cut it. You actually need an in-house lawyer.” They said “No, we
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