Doing pro bono can lead to good paying legal work. Just ask Burton Brillhart.
In 2010, Brillhart’s wife received a phone call from a former colleague, whose little sister and her roommate had a legal issue. The pair had left cheerleading apparel company Spirit Innovations to work for a competitor, Varsity Brands.
The young women had received demand letters from Spirit pointing out that they had signed a non-compete clause and threatened court action if they continued to work for Varsity.
“The two could not afford a lawyer, and my wife asked me to take a look at their case pro bono,” says Brillhart, who at the time was a partner at McGlinchey Stafford. “I determined that the document did not meet the legal standard of an enforceable non-compete.”
Brillhart talked with officials at Spirit Innovations and reached a settlement agreement that was acceptable for both sides.
A few days later, Brillhart received a call from Jeff Webb, the CEO of Varsity, asking why he represented his employees for free. Webb was impressed and started sending legal work for the business, including two major acquisitions and taking the publicly traded business private. By 2014, Varsity legal work comprised 40% of Burton’s caseload.
“It was a case of unintended consequences,” Brillhart says. “These were two young women who did not have the ability to fight it on their own. But it shows that lawyers doing pro bono work does have financial rewards.”
In June 2015, Varsity made Brillhart its first full-time general counsel. In the four years since, Brillhart and Varsity have won a series of high-profile lawsuits, including a landmark victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, he and his legal team scored a $3.1 million judgment against a competitor for stealing trade secrets and confidential information from Herff Jones, a subsidiary of Varsity.
“Besides his remarkable service to our community, Burton is one of the most talented and versatile general counsels anywhere,” says Michael Hurst, a partner at Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst, who represented Varsity in the trade secrets case. “He has led Varsity Brands to unprecedented horizontal and vertical growth in the past few years, facilitating enormous transactions with his business teams and outside counsel, and leading the negotiations and completion.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to announce that Brillhart is a finalist for the 2019 DFW General Counsel of the Year Award for a Small Legal Department.
The finalists for the 2019 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Awards will be honor – and the winners announced – at the annual awards ceremony Jan. 30 at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and Institute.
“Despite his deep legal experience and his obvious knowledge and understanding of the law and the GC’s role, Burton truly thinks like a businessperson,” says Sam Megally, a partner at K&L Gates in Dallas.
“He invests significant time and effort in making sure he understands where his organization is today and where it wishes to be tomorrow, and he is strategic both in his advice to the business and in his approach to helping the business achieve its goals,” Megally says.
Other lawyers who work with Brillhart agree.
“Burton not only has the ability to facilitate major corporate deals, but also has a litigation background and is not afraid to get into the trenches with his outside counsel for a courtroom battle when warranted,” says Kristin Snyder Higgins, the Dallas office managing shareholder at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, which represents Varsity in employment and labor matters.
“Burton manages the legal demands of numerous, varied businesses under the Varsity Brands umbrella and he knows each of them/their industries intimately,” says Higgins.
Brillhart created the legal department in 2015. He now has three general counsel, each handling a division of the business. He also has a deputy GC, a corporate counsel and five paralegals reporting to him.
“I would go watch my grandfather in court when I was 10. He was an old-fashioned lawyer who would find ways to help people. Sometimes he would receive homemade jelly from people who could not afford to pay him money.”
“It is obvious that Burton is an excellent lawyer with good instincts and a pragmatic approach to law that make him a valuable partner to the business units in his organization,” Megally says. “However, I hope that Burton also receives recognition for his unique ability to mentor and empower more junior attorneys, especially minority and women attorneys, both within and outside of his department.”
Brillhart grew up in the small town of Alice, Texas, which has the nickname “The Hub City of South Texas.”
His parents were deeply involved in the South Texas business community. His father ran the savings and loan that his grandfather co-founded after World War II. His mother founded and operated a real estate and appraisal brokerage for more than 40 years.
Brillhart’s grandfather was Homer Dean, an oil, gas and probate lawyer for 60 years and a close personal friend of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In fact, Dean was the Jim Wells County Attorney in 1948 when the infamous Precinct 13 ballot dispute occurred giving the U.S. Senate election to LBJ.
“I would go watch my grandfather in court when I was 10,” Brillhart says. “He was an old-fashioned lawyer who would find ways to help people. Sometimes he would receive homemade jelly from people who could not afford to pay him money.
“He was quite the legal and business force in Texas, particularly South Texas,” he says. “He was a huge influence in my life and the main reason I wanted to be an attorney since the age of 12.”
Brillhart went to college at Baylor and then graduated from St. Mary’s University Law School in 1996.
Brillhart’s first job was practicing commercial litigation at a small firm in San Antonio, but the economy was slow and there were fewer opportunities in the legal market.
Dallas beckoned. Godwin White & Gruber hired Brillhart to handle labor and employment litigation matters. His clients included Ross Perot and Norman Brinker.
“I worked 12 to 15 hours a day at the firm and then did business development at night,” he says.
One of his biggest clients was Drive Financial Services, which convinced Brillhart to join the business as its first general counsel. He also served as the chief legal officer for two other financial institutions, Inspire Auto Finance and MGC Mortgage.
In May 2010, he went back to private practice, joining McGlinchy Stafford as a partner. That is when his relationship with Varsity Brands started and flourished.
Brillhart was the co-lead counsel in 2011 when Varsity merged with Herff Jones, an Indianapolis-based supplier of graduation robes, rings and other products.
Two years later, he also co-led Herff Jones’ acquisition of sporting goods equipment and sports uniforms distributor BSN Sports.
Brillhart also co-led the company going private in 2014 in a reported $1.5 billion deal led by Charlesbank Capital Partners. The business rebranded itself under the name Varsity Brands and hired Brillhart to be the company’s first chief legal officer.
In 2018, Brillhart played a key role when Varsity Brands was acquired by Bain Capital for a reported $2.5 billion.
The litigation side of the Varsity Brands legal department has also been active the past few years.
Varsity sued a competitor, Star Athletica, for infringing on its cheerleading uniform design, which it said was a violation of federal copyright law. The federal district judge in Tennessee originally ruled that uniform designs such as these were not eligible for copyright restriction.
Brillhart appealed and the U.S. Circuit Court for the Sixth Circuit reversed, saying that the district court should have deferred to the U.S. Copyright Office, which had granted Varsity’s design copyright protection.
Star Athletic appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. By a vote of seven to two, the justices ruled in Varsity’s favor.
“Taking a case to the Supreme Court was a fascinating, though very costly experience,” Brillhart says. “It makes it better that the court ruled for our argument.”
In 2019, Brillhart was back in court – this time in Alabama.
Varsity learned that a competitor of its Herff Jones division had used confidential information obtained from two former Herff Jones employees to steal business.
Brillhart sued the competitor, Jostens, and the two former Herff Jones employees – John Wiggins and Chris Urnis – for theft of trade secrets. He hired lawyers on the ground in Mobile and Michael Hurst of Dallas to lead the litigation.
“Burton was decisive in taking on the company’s biggest competitor resulting in a multimillion-dollar jury verdict in April that included punitive damages,” says Hurst, who nominated Brillhart for the GC of the Year award. “Burton is not afraid to go to trial. In fact, his confidence comes from believing in his own people and believing in the integrity of his business.”
A critical moment in the litigation actually occurred at the beginning when the Herff Jones legal team employed the discovery tactics crucial to obtaining the “smoking gun” evidence they presented at trial.
There were incriminating emails that Wiggins and Jostens executive Louis Kruger exchanged via their wives’ email accounts before Wiggins resigned from Herff Jones.
“We knew all these things were happening in an underhanded way, but we needed to develop that evidence through discovery, which we did,” Brillhart told The Texas Lawbook in an interview last year.
Jostens argued at trial that it didn’t do anything wrong, that Wiggins and Urnis moves were part of an industry standard, and that Herff Jones itself once recruited Wiggins and Urnis away from Jostens.
The jury, which heard two weeks of testimony and argument, deliberated seven hours before returning a verdict in favor of Herff Jones and awarding $3.1 million.
Brillhart said the trial win is important for Varsity Brands and Herff Jones because it “upholds the integrity of the contracts” they use with the more than 2,000 salespeople that the company does business with nationally who “work with us on a day-to-day basis and who go into schools on our behalf every day.
“We were serious about protecting the integrity of our agreements and seeing it all the way through,” Brillhart said. “It’s why I built a substantial legal team that included the finest attorneys, not just from Mobile, but from Dallas.”
The case is now on appeal.
“Burton not only has the ability to broker and facilitate major corporate deals, but also has a litigation background and is not afraid to get into the weeds with his outside counsel in a courtroom battle when needed,” says Ogletree partner Ron Chapman.
“Burton partners with his internal business partners and his outside counsel to aggressively safeguard Varsity’s best interests – the touchstone quality of an excellent general counsel,’ he says.