The LMAF Interview: Miko Ando Brown

LMAF interviews peek into the lives and minds of some of the most compelling figures in the legal industry. Interviewees answer three questions from each of three categories—savvy, salty, and personal—to reveal unique insights and talents driving our field.

Miko Ando Brown

Platform

Miko Ando Brown is the founder of Project Ganesha, an organization dedicated to coaching and mentoring women and diverse attorneys. Project Ganesha is changing the conversation about how women and diverse associates become law firm partners, “without sacrificing their health, happiness, and true identities.”

Miko is also a proud mom of three and an active mentor and community leader. Over a 24-year legal career, Miko has been Associate General Counsel at Airbnb and a partner in two of Denver’s largest law firms. She is currently completing a sabbatical to spend more time with her children before they reach age 18—more on that below—and promoting others for great jobs even as she interviews for those same roles (much to the confusion of HR screeners)!

Savvy

What are clients asking for that you just don't see law firms delivering yet? Short, practical advice that considers the totality of the business, not just the legal risks.

I saw this a lot at Airbnb, where outside counsel would give advice that would significantly reduce the legal risk. But from a practical perspective, I couldn't do it without getting a lot of business people really, really mad—delaying launches, costing the company money because of delays to implement the advice. And then the advice is pretty much worthless.

Show the in-house lawyer that you're thinking about the business and you're not rendering legal advice in a vacuum. That will go a really long way.

When lawyers give advice, I would love to see that they are looking at it not just through the legal lens, but also asking, “How is this going to affect the rest of the business?” I asked a lawyer to give me advice on how to reduce legal risk. They gave great advice—and then they said, “So all you have to do is change your customer contract terms.”

I can't just change the contract terms! It's a very long process with significant revisions involving a lot of people—and potential far-reaching business effects. But that sort of naiveté is common. “Just change the contract terms, and you'll be fine.”

Do you ever look back on your career as a law firm partner and think that you missed opportunities? A million!

Since you've seen the roles from both sides, how can outside counsel think about the bigger parts of the business? What can they anticipate? It's really important that before rendering advice, a lawyer ask in-house counsel some questions about how the business works as a whole. For example, how difficult is it to change a contract? How far along in the development cycle is this product already? Are we at the beginning stage when it's easy to make a change, or are we about to launch and making any major changes probably isn't realistic? Show the in-house lawyer that you're thinking about that and you're not rendering legal advice in a vacuum. That will go a really long way.

What do you think the legal profession should steal from another industry? Leadership training.

People, generally speaking, do not come out of the womb knowing how to be good leaders.

Say more. I have yet to see a law firm or in-house legal department that makes leadership training part of the regular curriculum and training for its lawyers. Every other business and every other profession that I see understands that people, generally speaking, do not come out of the womb knowing how to be good leaders.

Other businesses and industries offer leadership classes. They offer executive coaches. They treat leadership development just like teaching somebody how to write a good brief or take a good deposition.

What's the best advice you've ever received? Stop making fear-based decisions.

Where'd the advice come from? While I was at Airbnb I got certified as an intuitive leadership coach by a woman who founded the Institute for Intuitive Intelligence. Her name is Ricci-Jane Adams. So this advice comes from Ricci-Jane, and it was largely the inspiration for Project Ganesha. That's why my logo has an elephant holding a mouse in the palm of its hands. Because that’s the one thing you know in the fables that elephants are afraid of.

Fear is your friendly ally. It's there to teach you something. So what is it trying to teach you? And how do you use it?

It comes from this notion that you can't run away from your fear. You can't hide from it. You can't bury it. You'll only be successful if you confront it, befriend it, and grapple with it. Fear is your friendly ally. It's there to teach you something. So what is it trying to teach you? And how do you use it?

Ricci-Jane teaches that humans are hardwired to prioritize negative outcomes and negative self-talk. It's a survival mechanism, right? When we were cavemen and you hear growling outside your cave, you run. It's fear, because you think about what's going to happen. “If I stay, I'm going to get eaten. I'm going to get mauled.” That fear is very much a survival tactic.

So humans tend to take a neutral fact and pile on the negative outcomes that might come about. We do this all the time. I'll give you an example: through my coaching with Project Ganesha, a main complaint I would hear from associates is that they aren't getting feedback from partners, so they don't know where they stand, they don't know how to improve. I would ask them, “Well, why don't you ask the partner for feedback?”

That's neutral, right? Asking a partner for feedback. There's nothing good about it. There's nothing bad about it. But what the associates would do is pile on all these negative outcomes that could happen if they ask for feedback:

“Well, if I ask the partner for feedback, they're really busy.

They're going to be annoyed.

And then they're going to think that I'm needy and not self-sufficient.

And then they're not going to want to work with me anymore.

And they're going to tell other partners that I can't handle things on my own and I'm

going to take up a lot of their time.

And so then other partners aren't going to work with me, and then I'm not going to have any work to do.

I'm not going to make my billable hours, and then I'm going to get fired, and then I'm going to be homeless, and I'm not going to be able to pay my student loans.”

They just pile on one negative thing after the other until they've talked themselves into paralysis. So then they don't ask for feedback.

This is very natural. Humans do it all the time. I ask them to recognize what they’re doing. Also, if you're going to go down that negative storyline, at a minimum balance it out with a positive narrative of what might happen, and which honestly, oftentimes is the most likely outcome.

Both narratives are completely fictional. But why go down the negative one? The positive one's just as likely.

Right? So:

“I'm going to ask a partner for feedback.

That partner is going to be so impressed that I took the initiative to own my career and ask for feedback, they are not only going to give me great feedback that's going to help me become a better lawyer, they're going to want to work with me more often because they're invested in me, and they see that I'm invested in myself.

And then they're going to tell other partners that I'm a rock star, that I'm the only associate who comes and asks them for feedback, because that's how much I care about my career.

And then all those partners are going to want to work with me.

I'm going to become the highest in-demand associate at the firm.

I'm going to make partner a year early.”

I mean, neither of those stories have actually happened. Neither of them have played out. Both narratives are completely fictional. But why go down the negative one? The positive one's just as likely. At least, if you go down that positive one, it tends to at least neutralize the negative talk.

Salty

What legal industry trend bothers you now, and why? Mentoring is dead! That's the legal industry trend that really bothers me, and I think it's pretty universally agreed upon that young lawyers just are not getting the mentoring from senior lawyers anymore. It was bad before the pandemic. It got a lot worse during and after.

People stopped being in the office where you just would walk down the hall or walk next door and have those conversations with more senior lawyers, or sit in on a call that they're having with a client, sit in on a deposition—which is where you really learn. Mentoring became a lot harder to come by once we moved to remote work. You have to be a lot more intentional about setting up a call, or getting everybody out of their houses and out of their yoga pants and going to a restaurant or the office. I would love to see that trend reversed.

What do you think of the trend toward getting everybody back to the office, except all of the senior folks are saying, “Hell no!” Studies have come out showing that lawyers are now the loneliest profession out there, and that this isolation is causing serious negative health effects on people. It's causing a lot of inflammation in the body. It's increasing alcoholism. It's increasing drug use.

So I really think there has to be a balance. The flexibility to work from home is great. It's been particularly good for parents and people caring for others. But there is a real risk, if work is fully remote all the time, and there's no regular get-togethers between people in person. There has to be a balance. I think it makes a lot of sense to have an anchor day—at least one—in the office. It doesn't do any good if somebody comes in and the offices are empty. I've seen a lot of businesses and firms say you have to be in two or three times a week, and then I hear from associates and partners, “I was in, and I was the only person there.” That completely defeats the purpose.

What words or phrase do you wish would go away from the business of law forever?

Billable hours.

Again, you've seen this from both sides as in-house and outside counsel. What's your take on the billable hour today? I’ve thought the same thing as a law firm attorney and in-house counsel. Billable hours reward inefficiency and penalize efficiency. That doesn't make any sense, and I don't think it leads to the best client service out there. I definitely saw it in-house. I would schedule a Zoom call to discuss an issue with outside counsel, and five lawyers would show up. There is no need for five lawyers to be there, and four of them would clearly be doing other work.

Billable hours reward inefficiency and penalize efficiency. That doesn't make any sense.

A billable-hour requirement largely incentivizes that over-staffing. On top of that, I think it results in much longer work product that no in-house lawyer has time to read. You know these 20-page, dense memos that are great for your billable hours. You probably knocked out, you know, 40 or 50 hours doing that.

But it's not good as the client. I don't have time to read that. I try to impose a rule on my outside counsel. Unless it’s something really, really beefy, it needs to be less than three pages because I don't have time to read it, and you know my boss doesn't have time to read it. But that’s not good for billable hours requirements.

Are you seeing positive signs that the market is getting together and valuing legal work such that the billable hour might go away? I see some interesting efforts. My old boss, Rich Baer [former CLO of Airbnb, now with Sirius XM], is always 10 steps ahead of everybody. He thought AI could be transformative in this respect. Because when it comes to putting together a flat-fee arrangement, it's so hard to tell how much money to allocate for discovery or summary judgment motions. AI might really help. It could go through invoices and get a much more accurate estimate in a short amount of time.

What's your go-to excuse to avoid a meeting? This is also from working with Ricci-Jane. Over the last few years I have tried very, very hard to show up as my honest and authentic self in everything I do. I've tried hard not to not to make excuses unless they are 100% true and I'm being fully transparent.

I took a sabbatical intentionally to spend time with my children. I was listening to a podcast right before my birthday that said you spend 90% of your time with your children before they turn 18. That was a gut punch to me, because my kids are 16, 15, and 12. So I took this time off specifically to spend time with them before they turn 18.

When people want to schedule meetings when my kids are home from school or during their spring breaks, I am honest that I took the sabbatical because I really, really want to spend time with my kids. And I promised myself that when they are not in school I'm going to be home. I'm not going to be doing meetings.

The added benefit of being that transparent is it's given other, younger lawyers courage to draw boundaries and prioritize their happiness and well-being, which is sorely needed.

Personal

What advice would you give your younger self? Prioritize your mental and physical health in this profession. Do not treat either like an afterthought or feel like you are being indulgent if you carve time out to exercise or make a healthy meal.

Your well-being is truly the foundation for a successful, long, happy career. I look back at the missteps that I made, the mistakes, the blunders when I was coming up—and that I still make! Often I make those mistakes when I'm tired, when I have a very short fuse because I'm angry and stressed, under the gun, haven't eaten well, haven't slept enough—that’s when I make those errors substantively that could be avoided if I had just taken a little bit better care of myself. So that is what I would tell myself to do.

Your well-being is truly the foundation for a successful, long, happy career.

How are you seeing it play out for young lawyers today? Are they feeling empowered to make those decisions? I don't know if I would call it “empowered;” I think it's the culture of how they have grown up. They just are not driven by money and prestige and power the same way the Gen Xers and Boomers were.

I think the generations after are starting to question, “What are the pros of making partner? What are the cons of making partner? Would it actually be better to be of counsel? Would I actually be happier?” They are much more about “I will work to live as opposed to live to work,” which I think is healthy.

Does that doom the equity model law firm? Will enough younger lawyers want to be owners to continue this model? I think these are the conditions for disruption. Gene Commander [law firm strategist and advisor] has great data about the number of people going to law school, especially white males. There just aren’t going to be enough of them to staff law firms anymore at the rate that we're going. I can't remember when Gene says we’ll run out, but pretty soon unless we figure out a way to keep women and diverse lawyers in the profession.

We've got to change the narrative of what it means to be an equity partner. Young associates are looking at these people and saying, “Wait a second. I have to suffer and sacrifice for eight years, and then if I make it, the partners I see are getting cancer. They're getting divorced. They're overweight. They drink too much.” More associates are like, “No, thank you.”

What is something that a mentor gave or taught you, without which you might not be here now? Michelle Banks [leadership coach and author, former Global GC of Gap Inc.] stopped me from dropping out of the practice of law. I was a first-year partner and had three children under four years old. It was 2011, I had just had my youngest, and it seemed completely overwhelming. You know, “How am I going to hit my billable hours? How am I going to build a book of business? How am I going to mentor? How am I going to do my community service? How am I going to continue to take care of myself, and hang out with my friends?” I was thinking there's just no way that I'm going to possibly be able to do this all. So I started thinking about off-ramps.

Thankfully there was an ABA Women's Leadership Conference in San Francisco. Michelle Banks was one of the first speakers. At the time she was the Global Chief Legal Officer of the Gap. She had a son and a husband, and she's fit and engaged in the community. Somebody asked her, “There aren't enough hours in the day. How do you do it?”

What subject, what hobby, what issue is it that when you talk about it your face lights up and it just brings you joy? That's your why.

She said, “The key is to find your why and then use that why to kill as many birds with one stone as humanly possible.” She told everybody in the audience to take five minutes, close your eyes, and think about what is it that makes you tick, other than your family. You love your family, of course, but what subject, what hobby, what issue is it that when you talk about it your face lights up and it just brings you joy? That's your why. Figure out that and then ask yourself, “How can I use my why to get as much done as possible?”

That's how I conceived of the Women in Leadership Lecture Series. [WILLS began as a women’s networking effort and became a successful business development driver. It went on to win the MCCA Vashon Innovator Award in 2014.]

My why is supporting and empowering women and diverse lawyers to reach their highest potential and whatever goals they set. That is my why. When I got on that plane back home to Colorado, I thought, “Okay, how can I use this why to kill as many birds with one stone as possible.” I had really been struggling with the business development piece. When I became a partner there were three women partners at the firm. Two didn't have kids and one lateraled in as a partner with kids.

My male mentors were amazing, but they did their business development on the golf course and at the country club, and I don't do any of that stuff. So I was really struggling. I thought, “I can use this women's leadership program to kill a lot of birds with one stone.” It became my business development. It became my community service. It became my mentoring. And honestly, it saved my career.

I have goosebumps. You just gave others the outline. What would you be doing if you weren't in the legal industry? I would be a curator of food and wine trips in the Napa Valley.

Are you taking any of those trips this year? Oh yeah. And anytime I hear anybody's going, I curate the trip for them. “Here are the wineries that you go to in this order. Here are the restaurants that you hit along the way. Here's where you stay.” I've got it down to a fine art.

Have you built this out as your side hustle, or your next career opportunity? You could sell this to lawyers for business development and make a gazillion dollars. You know, I've never thought about monetizing it, but I actually have done it for business development when I was in private practice, and people would rave.

Bonus Question

LMAF invites every guest to answer one question they weren’t asked but wish they had been.

If you could give another lawyer one piece of advice, what would it be? Don't treat this job like a zero-sum game. There are enough seats at the table for everyone. There are enough clients out there for everyone. You will, in fact, be more successful, healthier, and happier if you approach this career with an abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset.

Don't treat this job like a zero-sum game. There are enough clients out there for everyone.

Do people need convincing when you talk about that? Oh, yeah, it's scary to think about, you know. Katie Reilly [partner and president at Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell] and I made this deal with each other to share when a client was coming to town, invite each other, invite other partners from the firm to dinner. We’d invite competitors, too. I mean, it's scary. “Are you kidding, you want me to invite my competitor to dinner with my client?”

Also, firms are different in terms of how they handle origination and credit. Often there's this incentive of well, “The only way I can guarantee that I'm going to get that phone call is if I'm the only lawyer in my firm that they know.” As opposed to going straight to the person who actually would be doing the work.

And we wonder why lawyers are lonely and at risk. Yeah, and stressed out and operating in fear all the time. I think there are more people who have embraced this abundance mindset. I think it's growing. But it's a very small minority of people. Most people are like, “What are you talking about?” They don't even know.

I have a really funny example. I started interviewing for jobs—

You're getting right into my last question. So what's next, Miko?

Yes, I’ve started interviewing for jobs. The same thing happened at two companies. I was talking with the HR screener and he said, “This is what we're looking for.” And I said, “Well, I check these boxes, but I don't check all of them. You know another person who you should talk to, who really fits the description of what you just spoke about is [-----]. She would be amazing at this.”

He asked, “So are you not interested?” I said, “No, I'm very interested! But I'm just saying that you should talk with [-----], too, because if I'm not a good fit, she might be a really good fit. She might be a better fit.”

He was so confused, like, I must not want the job if I'm sending him other qualified candidates, right? And this happened at another company as well. I even offered to make an introduction. They were so perplexed as to why I would do that. I had to explain, “Look, this sounds like a great job. If I don't get this job, I would love it if one of my friends did, and I want you to find the best person. I know there's a great job out there for me.” There are plenty of great jobs out there, but I mean, just the look of utter confusion on this man’s face!