In 2019, during Lindsay Board’s first trial as an associate at Daniel Brown Law LLP, she witnessed her new boss do something remarkable. The defence firm’s eponymous founder asked the judge to end early for the day so he could get home for his son’s birthday celebrations. “It sounds small,” says Board. “But I’d never seen someone senior, particularly a man, be so transparent about asking for what they needed for work-life balance, especially in court.” She had joined the firm that year, as a second-year lawyer, from a litigation boutique—where she’d primarily practised in corporate-commercial litigation but also had just enough exposure to criminal cases to spark a passion and a career pivot. It was striking, so early in Board’s criminal-defence career, to watch someone as established as Brown publicly choose to make space for his personal life. “That kind of thing is really important to see.”
It was also a reassurance that Brown would live up to what he’d promised Board during her interview process with the firm: humane working conditions, ample development opportunities, a clear path to partnership and agency over her career. “He said, ‘I don’t want to squeeze every drop of productivity out of you so that you get burnt out and leave,’” recalls Board. “He told me he wanted to be able to do meaningful work together for the long term, and that’s proven to be 100 percent true.”
Today, Board is a partner at Brown’s 14-lawyer operation, which has quietly grown from a tiny shingle put out by a guy who fell into law almost by happenstance—“I applied to law school to prove to my mother that I could,” says Brown—into one of the country’s most prominent defence firms. None of this was Brown’s plan back in 2008, when, after a few years at a large defence shop, he decided to go it alone. It wasn’t until four years later, when he hired his first associate, that he started to think about what it would take to get a good lawyer to stay. Once he started on that line of thought, he couldn’t stop. Was it even possible to create a defence firm that lets junior talent pursue the kind of busy, exciting work that lights them up, without grinding them into the ground? If so, could he build it?
By chasing the answers to those questions, Daniel Brown Law has become a rare defence firm in which people tend to stick around. “It happened very organically,” says Brown. “Everything’s been an experiment.”