Interview with Bradley Libuit

I started my career at another law firm with Rachel Proffitt and Jon Avina, who were important mentors to me. We had worked with Cooley a number of times, and in 2017 a group of us decided to make the move, because we saw how differently the firm operated and were excited by the energy around what Cooley was building.

I remember meeting Joe Conroy early on and being struck by how personable he was in the room. The fuller picture came into focus at my first partner meeting in DC. What stood out was not any one person being celebrated for an individual win, but the way the firm recognized success as something shared. People were proud of the client work, of course, but the emphasis was on Cooley’s success together. As a first-time partner, I found it validated everything I had heard about the culture and reinforced that Cooley was a place where relationships mattered as much as the work itself.

I was based out of the San Francisco office. What I noticed immediately was the energy across offices and how quickly professional relationships became real friendships.

Since I joined Instacart, the Cooley relationship hasn’t stood still. I’ve been introduced to a new generation of partners I respect and enjoy working with, which tells you something about the kind of people the firm keeps attracting. Cooley is known for excellent legal work, but its real differentiator is the relationship-first culture. Working for and with Cooley has never felt transactional.

I wasn’t looking to go in house. It grew out of the relationship. I had been working with Instacart since its Series C financing as outside counsel and had stayed close to the team as the business scaled. By the time I joined full time, it felt less like leaving one role for another and more like continuing the same work from the inside, with people I already trusted, and the same Cooley relationships that had supported the business all along.

The timing also felt significant. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Instacart’s growth accelerated sharply, and, more importantly, the company took on a vital role in helping people access food and essentials during an uncertain time. That made the opportunity feel even more meaningful and reinforced that the work had a real mission behind it.

Everything I did at Cooley gave me the foundation for the role I’m in today.

At a firm, you are rewarded for knowing the law and getting the technical answer right. Cooley holds that standard seriously. But Cooley gave me something less obvious. It taught me what it means to operate inside a true partnership, where you rely on your partners, they rely on you, and the wins are shared. That’s not just how the firm is structured. It’s a habit you build, and it teaches you to think about the client’s whole business and see what’s coming before they ask.

In house, all of that becomes the job. You need the judgment, and the ability to rely on and be relied upon by cross-functional partners, the executive team and the board. Cooley built that in me. I did not have to unlearn anything when I joined Instacart; I just applied it from a different seat.

When I joined, I didn’t have a fully formed blueprint. I knew my job was to help take the company public, but I didn’t yet understand what that meant from the inside.

What I did know was the relationships I wanted to build. I had already worked closely with the executive team, and now I wanted to deepen those relationships from the inside rather than across the table and earn the trust of employees who didn’t yet know me in that capacity.

What I didn’t yet appreciate was how quickly the role would outgrow that first assignment. Helping take the company public got me in the door, but the mandate kept widening every year, into M&A, risk management, legal technology and operations, and a lot of work I hadn’t expected to own. The blueprint filled in from there, and I grew with it.

What surprised me most was the scope of ownership, and how much I came to love it. As outside counsel, even on transactions I had done many times, I realized I had only ever seen part of the picture.

Taking Instacart public is the clearest example. From the outside, my focus was the registration statement. From the inside, the job is to take the whole company public. That means every employee who had been there for years waiting for that moment, not just the process and the filings. Next to all of that, the Form S-1 almost seems like the easy part.

That pattern holds well beyond the IPO. Whether you’re outside counsel or in house, you need a strong legal foundation, and that never goes away. But in house, the legal question is rarely what the conversation is actually about. The rest is context and timing, and mostly it’s understanding how a decision lands across the whole organization. That is a different skill set, and it took me time to fully appreciate it.

What I set out to build was a durable public company legal function. We had roughly three years of runway, so the goal was to stand up the systems a public company actually runs on, from disclosure controls and governance to equity administration – and to do it so they would hold up well beyond the first couple of years.

I tried to look around corners based on everything I had seen as outside counsel, including helping take companies like Zoom public. What challenges had other companies faced? What policies and systems should we put in place early so they will still work years later? That has been the satisfying part. Not the headline event, but a function that keeps serving the company for the long haul, and that keeps getting sharper. That’s part of why I also lead our legal technology and operations team. The tools are changing what a lean legal team can do, and I want us building with them, not reacting to them.

The obvious answer is taking the company public. We listed in 2023 in a $660 million IPO, when the IPO market had largely stalled and very few technology companies were going public, which made the timing a real challenge. To protect employees and support their liquidity once the lock-up expired, we designed a novel anti-dilutive IPO structure, enabled by careful cap-table engineering. It was the kind of creative, high-stakes problem-solving that makes the in-house seat so rewarding. We talked through the specifics of the deal in a Cooley Market Talks conversation.

But for someone who built a career on IPOs, the more meaningful answer is what came after the listing. Starting as a team of one, I’ve built a function, and a team, I’m genuinely proud of, which includes colleagues who came up through Cooley and brought that same relationship-first orientation with them. The team has built something that holds up well past the specific milestone, and I’ve been lucky to help shape careers along the way.

What I enjoy most is the range. I can start the day without knowing exactly what I will be working on, and by the end I might have moved from a board governance question to an equity matter for an acquisition to a disclosure call with our accounting team.

And each of those asks something different of you. One needs precision, one needs speed, one needs you to read the room. Doing them well in the same afternoon is a different kind of work than getting any one of them right, and that variety is what keeps me sharp.

The Cooley people who had the biggest impact on me are Rachel Proffitt and Jon Avina. Rachel was my summer associate mentor back in 2008, and Jon staffed me on my first high-profile IPO. Both have been important professional influences and close friends, and they’ve been there for many of life’s milestones, including my wedding.

Joe Conroy, then Cooley’s CEO and now its chairman, took a chance on me as a new partner, and that kind of belief shapes how you think about relationships as you move forward. TJ Graham made the move to Cooley alongside me and has remained a trusted advisor. I also had the chance to learn from partners like Jamie Leigh, Peter Werner, Dave Peinsipp and Matt Bartus, who showed me what building a practice with real depth looks like.

In some ways, I feel even closer to Cooley now than when I was there. The relationships have deepened over time, and wherever I go, there always seems to be a Cooley alum or a Cooley connection nearby. The kind of people Cooley attracts are the kind of people I genuinely want to stay connected to.

 

Invest in the relationship, not in the deal.

Deals are exciting, but they end. Client relationships don’t have to. I kept the same client for a decade, across three seats, by treating reliability and trust as the real work, not the closing checklist. That approach is what opened the doors that followed.