Janice P. Brown

Brown founded and served as chief strategy officer of Brown Law Group, which for 20 years specialized in employment defense. And she is the founder of Beyond Law, a business designed to teach lawyers entrepreneurial skills. Earlier in her 35-year career she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice’s tax division, litigating tax issues in the western states. She is a certified American Arbitration Association arbitrator.

“When the pandemic happened, Meyers Nave moved into my office building and we started talking,” Brown said. “They said you have something special and we think we can help you enhance it. As someone who’s been wooed by other law firms, that’s unique. I didn’t even have to change my desk or my chair.”

Brown merged her law firm into Meyers Nave in 2020. She is now a principal in Meyers Nave’s labor and employment practice, its workplace investigations practice and its commercial litigation practice.

She said she brought along long-term clients such as the Los Angeles Chargers and Bank of America. She has also represented Allstate Insurance Co., The Coca-Cola Co., Chubb Insurance, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, the Regents of the University of California, the San Diego LGBT Community Center and many others.

Her counseling practice is partly centered on guiding clients through the complexities of the vaccine mandate issue. “I did a presentation last month,” she said in August. “I figured if San Francisco as a city could mandate vaccines for city employees, that would be the model for other municipalities and cause a trend. And private employers can be even a little more stringent.”

Brown keeps a close eye on the economic consequences of Covid and how best to mitigate them. “Vaccines and other measures all go toward protecting the economy,” she said, pointing out that she is the immediate past chair of the San Diego Economic Development Corp. “Covid wiped out 20 years of increased tourism here. We can’t afford to ignore that vaccines reduce the risk to people’s productive lives and good jobs.”

Her longstanding emphasis on minority economic development got a boost at Meyers Nave, Brown said. “Here, 70 percent of the firm is minority or women, and since I got here my business has about doubled. I continue to love my job, and I continue to love empowering lawyers to become better at what we all do.”

- John Roemer