Brian Potts JD'04
Partner, Perkins Coie LLP
Member, VLGS Alumni in Energy
Business attorney, litigator, entrepreneur, and writer Brian Potts has advised a range of Fortune 100, 500, and smaller clients. Brian and his team have appeared in more than 50 administrative proceedings and dozens of federal and state court cases.
Brian is currently representing clients in three federal lawsuits―each of which involves claims or assets worth more than $100M. He has also been involved in billions of dollars’ worth of business transactions and has helped his clients obtain regulatory approvals to build more than $4 billion dollars’ worth of utility infrastructure in various states, including conventional power plants, transmission lines, wind farms, and solar facilities.
In 2002, as a second-year law student, Brian applied to work at every one of the Top 100 law firms in the country. He received form rejection letters from all of them. Less than a decade later, Brian was among the youngest to make equity partner at one of those firms. And today, he’s an equity partner at Perkins Coie―where his form rejection letter from the firm in 2002 hangs on his office wall.
In his free time, Brian likes to help startup companies get off the ground. A successful entrepreneur, himself, Brian invented the first and only computer keyboard designed by lawyers for lawyers (called the LegalBoard®) in 2016. And in 2017, Brian helped found his second startup, Goods Unite Us®, which is a nonpartisan, for-profit app and website focused on helping consumers align their purchases and investments with their political beliefs. On Election Day 2020, with Brian’s guidance, a Goods Unite Us subsidiary partnered with an investment advisory firm to launch the first political exchange-traded fund ever listed on NASDAQ.
Since 2013, Brian has been ranked by Chambers USA and listed in The Best Lawyers in America and Wisconsin Super Lawyers. Best Lawyers also named him “Lawyer of the Year” in the Energy Regulatory Law category in 2018 and 2020, and the firm named him co-chair of its 100-plus lawyer Energy Industry Group in 2020.
Brian credits much of his success to his never-ending focus on writing and public speaking. Since law school, Brian has published more than 100 articles and opinion pieces. Besides Forbes.com (where he is a contributor), his articles and opinion pieces have also been published in the Wall Street Journal, Politico, Bloomberg, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Weekly Standard, and in law journals published by Yale, Harvard, N.Y.U., and UC Berkeley. Brian is also a regular guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and he teaches a course on renewable energy project development and finance at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
In his active pro bono practice, Brian serves as outside counsel to the Clean Lakes Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the improvement and protection of Southern Wisconsin’s lakes, streams, and wetlands; he is also the lead counsel for the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance, a small nonprofit aimed at preserving and restoring thousands of acres of prairie in South Central Wisconsin.