In the second grade, teachers assigned Jennifer Brown and her classmates a writing project that included composing a page in which the students had to say something about themselves.
“I wrote that I was going to be a lawyer,” she says.
Brown had no lawyers in her family – her father was in technology software operations and her mother was a controller.
Today, Brown is the assistant general counsel at Northlake-based Farmer Brothers, which manufactures and distributes more than 300 kinds of coffee, tea and related products to restaurants and businesses.
A 2006 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, Brown leads Farmer Brothers’ corporate governance, securities and M&A activities. The company, which is traded on the NASDAQ, employs 1,800 people and has a market cap of $410 million.
“I love coffee, especially South American coffee – I drink about three cups a day, no cream and no sugar,” she says. “It is a huge factor when you are a lawyer for a business and you really believe in the company and the product, and I love coffee.
“Otherwise, it is just a J-O-B,” she says, spelling it out.
The DFW Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to announce that Brown is a finalist for the 2018 Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Senior Counsel of the Year Award for a Small Legal Department.
“Jennifer has the best big-picture thinking of any lawyer I know,” says Valerie Thomas, a Dallas lawyer who nominated Brown for the award. “She is diligent, hard-working and an incredible asset to Farmer Brothers.
“In addition to brainstorming new business development ideas, Jennifer keeps all departments of Farmers Brothers.
Brown was born in Wisconsin, but her family moved to the DFW area when she was in the seventh grade.
“We moved to Coppell just a couple years after Coppell started growing,” she says.
Brown went to college at the University of Texas, where she was in the Business Honors Program.
“It was an amazing four years to spend around creative and motivated people,” she says. “It was a great place with ideas.
“I was interested in investment banking and getting deals done,” she says. “I was told that lawyers get deals done.”
UT Law was her next stop.
“I was given a trial binder project at my first clerkship and I looked it over and said, ‘No thank you.’ I knew litigation was not for me,” she says. “I loved school and I stayed at UT until my dad said I couldn’t stay any longer and that I needed to get a job.”
Brown graduated in 2006 and went to work in the corporate securities practice in the Dallas office of global legal giant Baker & McKenzie. She also spent four years in the corporate section at Jones Day, another mega law firm.
“The ‘holy crap’ moment comes when you get your first office and suddenly things are now expected of you,” she says. “It was like jumping into a tub of ice water.”
In 2015, Brown started looking for a new challenge and considered possibly going in-house.
“I had a few offers, but Farmer Brothers was an easy decision,” she says.
Brown says she started drinking coffee as a child at a pie shop in Wisconsin.
“We are a coffee company, and I firmly believe that coffee should be served at every meeting,” she says. “It is important for the team, even the lawyers, to appreciate all the different products and the work that our employees do.”