Brooks Beard
Brooks is the Vice President & Deputy General Counsel – Litigation, Employment, Cybersecurity, and Regulatory Compliance at VMware, where he oversees a global team of legal professions covering subject matter areas such as litigation, government inquiries and investigations, employment law issues, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and VMware’s Dawn Raid Program. He is also a member of VMware’s Cybersecurity Response Team, Emergency Response Team, and Crisis Management Team. Mr. Beard previously served for a year as the interim lead of VMware’s global Ethics & Compliance Team and, during the same period, lead the Privacy Team.
Brooks joined VMware in 2014 after spending 18 years in private practice, including 17 years at Morrison & Foerster in its San Francisco office, where he became a partner in January 2005. While at Morrison & Foerster, Mr. Beard had a broad-based litigation practice representing clients in state and federal court, as well as before state and federal administrative agencies, focusing on intellectual property (patent, trademark, and trade secrets), false advertising, environmental, breach of contract, trade secret, white-collar criminal, and civil rights matters, among other types of matters. In addition to being admitted to practice in several Federal District Courts, Mr. Beard is admitted to practice before the Eighth, Ninth, Eleventh, and Federal Circuit U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States.
In October 2007, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Mr. Beard to serve as a Commissioner on the San Francisco Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board—a position he held until 2013. And from 2009 until 2014, Mr. Beard sat on the Eco-Entrepreneurship Advisory Council and the Council of Legal Advisors at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mr. Beard received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, his J.D., cum laude, from Vermont Law School, and his LL.M., with distinction, from the Georgetown University Law Center.