Brent Rice '25
Staff Editor
On Tuesday, October 3, Professor Mike Lincoln ’91, Vice Chair of Cooley LLP, ducked out of the office a bit early and began the familiar drive down Route 29 to UVA Law. Now in his twenty-fourth year of teaching a course as an adjunct professor on Emerging Companies and Venture Capital (ECVC for those who Nym), Lincoln was arriving even earlier than his regularly scheduled class to address a large group of students at the invitation of the Virginia Law Emerging Companies and Venture Capital Society. The topics of the conversation included a bit of background into Lincoln’s own career trajectory, life working in ECVC, and a Q&A period for curious students.
Pictured: Professor Mike Lincoln '91
Photo Credit: Cooley LLP
Lincoln’s Background
Lincoln began the night’s conversation the same way he begins his class each semester he teaches, with a PowerPoint deck depicting his wife, children, and dogs, a refreshing change of pace from someone who has ascended to the highest levels in Big Law. His point being, especially in the realm of ECVC, it is impossible to separate your personal life from this type of work. He shared that in the practice of emerging companies, your work is deeply embedded with the relationships you build with founders and their teams. Just as he has met the parents, spouses, and children of his founder clients, so too have his clients met and heard much about the family that is at the heart of Lincoln’s life. In Lincoln’s view, you can’t simply drop your family at the door on the way into the office and pick them back up when you leave.
After graduating from UVA Law, Lincoln began his career in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins, practicing as a corporate attorney. After several years, he began to have an itch to work in tech and entrepreneurship, which precipitated a move to the Richmond-based firm of Hunton & Williams (now Hunton Andrews Kurth) where he became Partner. Ever captivated by the potential of the emerging companies market, Lincoln later made the jump to Silicon Valley-based Cooley LLP to co-found the firm's first East Coast office in Reston, Virginia.
Cooley’s Approach to Lifecycle Representation
Next, Lincoln expounded upon his approach to emerging company representation noting that “the goal is to represent not only emerging companies, but unicorn companies that go on to do something big in Lifecycle Representation.” By all accounts, this approach seems to have been successful as evidenced by Cooley’s representation of NVIDIA, Tableau, Zoom, and Uber in their IPOs and, in some cases, eventual sales. Despite the aforementioned examples, Lincoln was quick to clarify that ECVC representation is not limited to tech companies. Rather, it is more about disruption, a drive towards liquidity, access to capital, and growth trajectory. One other interesting practice by Cooley is to allow its attorneys to invest in some of the start-up companies they represent through an affiliated investment fund. According to Bloombergy Law, this practice allowed Cooley attorneys to acquire a roughly $150 million stake in Snowflake Inc., a company for which Cooley LLP handled the IPO.[1]
Why You Should Consider Practicing in ECVC
As for the career prospects in the emerging companies practice area, Lincoln was highly optimistic. For those interested in this practice, he stressed the importance of networking and maintaining relationships with family members, undergraduate, and law school classmates who go on to start or join early-stage companies. Lincoln also emphasized that practicing in the fast-paced environment of emerging companies means that young lawyers can quickly become experts in their field by taking an interest in new technologies and reading up on them, rather than slowly climbing the ladder in the more traditional practice groups. Those who do plan to enter this area should be prepared for entering a high number of time entries as Lincoln noted that there is not much block billing when a typical day might involve working on eight to ten different client matters, rather than just one or two larger blocks.
Lincoln concluded his presentation by once again focusing on the people. He noted, “Law firms and lawyers don’t need to see around corners, they just need to follow the people that can”.
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[1] Brian Baxter, Snowflake’s IPO Was a Startup Stock Success For One Big Law Firm, Bloomberg Law (Sep. 30 2020), https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/business-and-practice/XLRIN5C000000?bna_news_filter=business-and-practice#jcite.