S1, E2: Breaking Big Law’s Burnout Culture: A Renewable Energy Firm’s Revolutionary Approach

[00:00:00] The renewable energy industry. Is vast and growing and it’s a really promising industry and people are going to make a lot of money at it. But for us, what we’re really giving up is money in exchange for time. And so that’s a really good trade for people who have perspective on what is important to them.

And if what is important to them is having time, because to me, it’s the most precious commodity that exists. So it’s an easy trade for me, and it’s an easy trade for most of our people, because they’re getting back time and still having a great impact on the world. Did you know the average person will work 90, 000 hours in their lifetime?

What if you could use those hours to find fulfillment and become a disruptor for good? Welcome to the Work That’s Worth It podcast. I’m Georgi Enthoven, and I’m here to demonstrate that an AMBITIOUS, MEANINGFUL, AND REWARDING CAREER IS NOT JUST A DREAM, IT’S ACHIEVABLE! EACH EPISODE WE’LL DIVE INTO [00:01:00] CONVERSATIONS WITH GLOBAL CHANGE MAKERS WHO’VE CRACKED THE CODE ON COMBINING INCOME AND IMPACT!
IF YOU’VE EVER FELT LIKE YOU WERE TORN BETWEEN A PAYCHECK AND YOUR PURPOSE, OR MAYBE YOU SIMPLY YEARN FOR MORE PURPOSE, YOU’RE GOING TO BE EXPOSED TO THE AMBITIOUS HUMANS WHO HAVE DONE IT THEMSELVES. READY TO MAKE YOUR WORK WORTH IT? LET’S GET STARTED!

I am grateful to have Brad De Jean join us on the podcast today. He is on a mission to help our communities in the U. S. successfully transition to renewable energy. His ambitions don’t stop there. As a family man, he’s committed to providing an ideal place to work for empathetic and talented individuals too.

Yes, that’s a lawyer and a family man. Brad grew up in Texas and his family relocated to Southern California when he was 16, which he now calls home. He became interested in renewable energy in the 2000s and decided to devote his career [00:02:00] exclusively to it in 2011. Values driven work is important to Brad.

He co founded Clean Energy Council in 2014 and has helped oversee its growth into a 35 lawyer firm, which is believed to be the largest renewable energy focused law firm in the country. Fun fact, Brad studied philosophy at UCLA in his undergraduate years. Perhaps that’s why he was able to imagine the ideal law firm, which he then made happen, making his work worth it.

Brad, it’s so nice to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Georgi. Well, I’m excited just to jump right in and learn lots about what you’ve been up to. And why don’t we start with you telling me the company you’ve started, the law firm, and what you guys do. Okay, sure. I co founded a firm called Clean Energy Council about 10 years ago.

We actually just celebrated our 10th anniversary and The idea behind it is that my initial co founder and I wanted to have a [00:03:00] firm that was exclusively dedicated to implementation of renewable energy. And we had a background in doing renewable energy and we thought that we could build a place that would be responsive to our clients and be a really great place for people to work.

One of our main drivers was to have balance in our lives. And at the time we both had young children and we wanted to make sure that we had time to spend with them. So we tried to create a place where it wouldn’t be the same level of grind that you get at a big law firm where we both had worked before.

And instead we could kind of carve a path that was focused on the renewable energy future, as well as. Our own personal goals in life, which went well beyond the law. Yeah, that’s amazing. That sounds like I’d love to explore both those two topics a little bit further. On the renewable energy side, were you guys early to start a firm like this?

I would say I don’t really know of any other firms like ours that were. At least of the [00:04:00] scale that we’ve created that we’re dedicated to renewable energy. We also were a work from home firm back in 2014 and all the way through. So both of those things, I think we’re pretty new. There were a lot of renewable energy lawyers and we had, in fact, both been.

Practicing exclusively in renewable energy for close to 10 years by the time we started the firm. So we had the background and the expertise and a lot of big firms have practice groups that include renewable energy. We didn’t really know of any at the time. We knew of other small firms that were trying to work remotely and have balance and things like that.

But we didn’t know of any that were focused exclusively on renewable energy at the time. And specializing in law, when does that happen? Well, law is, for me, shortly after going to undergrad. And I guess during that, I was trying to map out my future. And I vacillated. There were times that I wanted to go [00:05:00] to medical school.

There were times that I, I was an engineering major for a while. So it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with my undergrad major. And then. When I found philosophy, I really started getting attracted to the law as mostly on the moral and ethics side, the law is something that was an important way kind of to stabilize societies and in a real important piece of how we interact as human beings is to basically I’m a rule follower and the law was kind of a good component of that.

So before the end of my undergraduate career, I had decided that I wanted to go to law school. I had no idea what I wanted to do with law. I just knew. I could be a lawyer, it would be more marketable than philosophy degree, and whether I was going to be someone who was a trial lawyer in court, or whether I was going to be doing transactional work, which is negotiating contracts and things like that, I had no idea.

Yeah, I love that you were a philosophy major and are young people today still allowed to be philosophy majors and enter law school? I hope so. I [00:06:00] mean it definitely for the philosophy major. It’s it’s interesting how many lawyers I meet that end up having this interesting outlook on life that their career is part of it, but it’s only a part of it.

How many of them have philosophy degrees? It’s sort of like, it gives you a chance as a young person to have introspection and to just not necessarily think, Oh boy, I’ve got to make money. I’ve got to do this. You can think more critically about where you stand in the world and why you’re here. And I think that that helps people carve a different future.

Yeah. Yeah. So when you went to law school, how was that process for you? How soon after undergraduate did you go and when did you start to find your pathway to clean energy? I applied for law school. I was finishing college. I had almost a year off between graduating and going to law school. So, I was kind of done.

I knew that there weren’t really any jobs that I was going to [00:07:00] be able to get with my philosophy degree that were Attractive enough for me to be like I wanted to do that for many years before going so I kind of knew I had the plan to do that. I also, my wife and I have been together for over 30 years.

And so I was already thinking about, okay, we’ve got family and other plans. So I better get moving on this. So I didn’t want to take much time off. And then, like I said before, when I went to law school, I didn’t really know what type of lawyer I wanted to be. I kind of thought that I would like to be a transactional lawyer, although I like a good argument.

I’m not really that much into combat and being a trial lawyer is really a lot about kind of very combative stuff, but I started out as a litigator. That was the best job that I could get. And so I was writing a lot of briefs and arguments and things like that for a while. And ultimately after a couple of years, I said, no, no, this is not what I wanted.

I want to have something that is more focused on people coming together and. [00:08:00] Putting a deal together and being happy about it at the end. Whereas in litigation, even the ones who win are usually pretty dissatisfied because they had to pay a lot to lawyers that they didn’t want to pay or something like that.
So I really wanted to go, I really wanted to help people put deals together and make money on their deals. And I thought that that would be a much more, just really a happier way of practicing law. So I found through a connection. An opportunity that involves going to work for a firm that did a lot of energy work.

I had not really thought about energy before, like it didn’t really know anything about the industry. Just like everybody else, I just paid my utility bill and the lights went on and off, but it ended up being that there’s a whole practice area that involves how energy resources are permitted, built and financed.

And that was the job opportunity that I had thanks to this person that I knew. And once I jumped into that, I really [00:09:00] enjoyed it. It was challenging in a lot of ways because. The energy market is highly regulated and it’s also highly commercial. There’s a lot of money involved in terms of like it’s cost millions of dollars to build power plants.

And the timeline for these can be really long. I found all the different challenges that you had to address very fascinating and interesting. So I did that for a while. And in doing that, I ended up transitioning to renewable energy as they started to pick up. Okay. And did you find yourself having to work like in oil and gas at some point as part of that?

And is that what helped you figure out that you wanted to really focus on renewable? Yes, not oil as much as in California. We had a lot of natural gas power plants. And so we were working for a company called Calpine, which owned a bunch of the power facilities in California and throughout the country.

Really, they were [00:10:00] an independent power producer, still are actually. And they were building gas fired power plants everywhere. We were financing them. So I worked a lot on those. They also did some renewables. They have a facility or did have a facility up in Northern California called the Geysers, which is the largest geothermal, which is a renewable geothermal takes steam from the ground and produces energy.

It was at the time the largest geothermal. Facility in the world. And we got to work on financing that as well. So I appreciated that. I saw the guys, very interesting stuff. And then, but what really happened is that Cal pine went bankrupt and their people, it still exists, but you don’t have a reorganization and their people kind of scattered throughout.

And the time the renewable energy industry was really growing. And a lot of my contacts ended up at renewable energy companies. And so that was where the work started happening. I really enjoyed it. And so a couple of years after that, I decided that I only wanted to do [00:11:00] renewable energy. You mentioned a connection got you started on this and you’ve just talked about contacts again.

Are you somebody who is unique in your field and collaborating and building strong relationships, or is it an important part of what you do? I would not say that I’m unique. I mean, there are literally hundreds of thousands of lawyers and probably thousands that do renewable energy. I definitely took my time to develop as a lawyer.

So I know it takes a while, but eventually I got to where I felt like I knew what I was doing pretty well so that I could give advice to people and it would be good advice, I guess. But there is definitely a part of interacting with people that I enjoy. I would say I’m an extrovert. I really enjoy talking to people, learning about what they like, what they do.

And it ends up being something that’s pretty easy for me just to chat with people and have fun with it. I rarely remain serious on an [00:12:00] entire phone call. I think that what we do should be fun. And I like having fun with it. So that part, I think that a lot of lawyers aren’t necessarily comfortable with the interpersonal part, but for me, I get a lot of pleasure out of it.

And I enjoy meeting people and making connections and helping them out. And it’s sort of when you like people and you like to help people, you end up with a lot of friends that like to help you as well. A lot of goodwill. Yeah, for sure. You had mentioned also how part of your inspiration for building your firm was lifestyle and wanting to be able to have more time with your children and doing a quick top line research.

It sounds like that is definitely one of the reasons somebody would work with you. Is they have more flexibility in the hours that they put in. Can you tell me about that and what else is unique about your law firm that it’s your value set that you bring [00:13:00] to the table that in a different environment that you have created?

Yeah, thanks. So I think that the two main things are when you’re in renewable energy, it stems from a concern over the future, like wanting to do something about the future. I want our children and their children to have a wonderful place to live. Like we do. I mean, I, I love it here. I think we have a bright future, but I think that we have a challenge in front of us, which is to reduce our dependency on oil and gas.

And so we need to deploy a lot of renewable energy to do that. And for me. Working in renewable energy is also my way of working for my children’s future. So, I like that that’s together, and then the balance part also comes from that. It’s really about taking the time to be able to spend with family and friends.

And when I was practicing at a big law firm, A few years would go by and really the only person that I’d be [00:14:00] spending time with would be my wife and she would make plans and I’d go to those, but I wasn’t really putting together my own path for my personal friendships and giving them time. And so, I didn’t think that that was any way to live.

A lot of lawyers will go through their whole life just working all the time. And they won’t stop and they end up missing out on the whole reason for working, which is to have the things that you need so that you can provide for your family and spend time with them. So my partner and I started, we were very focused on meeting that balance and he set out our core values about five years ago.

We actually, we had thought about them, but we never set them out. Balance became the one that we all gravitated toward as like, this is hugely important for us. And it also is the one that really did become our best recruiting tool because people see that. And at first they were skeptical of what do you mean balance?

Like this can’t be true. Lawyers don’t have any balance in our life. [00:15:00] We all know that. And So no, no, really, it is true. And people who were very talented working at major law firms in the, in the country, they were attracted to that and they trusted us enough to give us a chance to show them that we meant it.

And it was really great in growing our team and our team. We just have fantastic people on our team. Yeah, so you’ve taken a risk in changing the format of how a lawyer normally works and you’ve given them some time back. What are the compromises on the other side that your fantastic talent, what’s the negotiation that they’ve had to overcome within themselves?

Well, I think that it’s really, there’s sort of the impact that you can make, and I think a lot of them, they like working for us because at the big firm, they can’t necessarily say no to working on oil and gas deals. So, the fact that they can have the impact exclusively at Renewable Energy. Is [00:16:00] something I think that they find very valuable and I find it valuable as well, but I think that ultimately what you give up is we can have this impact and we make really for me, very attractive income and I think for most people that we work with, they say, yeah, it’s attractive.

It’s not as much money as people make at big firms, but that’s not really because we’re making an impact. The renewable energy industry. Is vast and growing and it’s a really promising industry and people are going to make a lot of money at it. But for us, what we’re really giving up is money in exchange for time.

And so that’s a really good trade for people who have perspective on what is important to them. And if what is important to them is having time, because to me, it’s the most precious commodity that exists. So it’s an easy trade for me and it’s an easy trade for most of our people because they’re getting back time and still having a great impact on the world.

Yeah. [00:17:00] Do you have role models that you have lent on in starting your firm as an entrepreneur or in the industry of law that you’re in? that you have worked with and how have those relationships shaped you or not? I certainly had a lot of people who helped me learn how to be a good lawyer. And I worked with some really wonderful people who are really great lawyers.

But I’d say that the thing that really drove me to decide that I wanted to start A business was really the exposure to my father in law and my wife who have their own law firm that my father in law started like 50 years ago or so. And my wife has been kind of managing for the last 15 years or so. And what I saw with that was that my father in law was always able to take vacations.

And travel and things like that were important to him. He works really, he still works, he works really hard, but he definitely takes the time to do the things that he [00:18:00] loves. He works so that he can do the things that he loves. And it also showed me that, so I determined that if I were to start my own firm, I would have more freedom.

You know, I didn’t have to answer to anybody who said, you have to be in the office at this time and for that, for how long. So that was something I saw, I was able to see up close. The importance of sort of getting control over your business life so that you can add that time to your personal life and also watching them and he gave me some ideas on how to run a business too.

So I’d say that those that my father in law and my wife were very influential and my dad was. extremely influential in work ethic. He was just a really hard worker. And it also showed me that in some instances, he didn’t have these opportunities. And I thought I could combine his work ethic with the idea of more control and it would be a better match.

So [00:19:00] somebody young looking to enter your field in law, what steps would you say they need to take? Like, are there some key steps? Do you need to go to a big law firm first? What would you recommend? I think the biggest thing is to state a desire that this is what you want to do. And if you say that this is my goal, this is what I want to do.

You’ll find a way to make it happen for me. Once I decided I wanted to open up my own firm, I started talking to people about it and just sharing the idea. And once I did that, that actually is what led to me having my first partner, because we ended up both speaking to the same person. Around the same time about having a similar idea, and then we ended up teaming up.

We’d known each other before and worked together before and that, that was, it’s just the almost speaking it into existence. So if I were a would be lawyer and I’m in law school, I would start [00:20:00] looking at firms that have renewable energy practices. I would start looking at people who are in the industry.

Anybody that I know, or anybody, anybody that my inner circle, my friends and family know that works in renewable energy, and just talk to those people about what it’s like, and when you talk to people who do it, you’re going to find, especially in this industry, people love it. People love working in the renewable energy industry, and they’re really happy to have other people who want to do it.

And it’s when you have that something you’re passionate about and you think is really great for our future, you’re going to share that with as many people as possible. So I find that the people that I spoke to when I started this and the people that I think that anyone in law school would speak to, they’ll be very generous with their time.

And in fact, we get solicitations from people that are in law school. That have no experience or sometimes even I got one from somebody at Berkeley [00:21:00] who said, I want to do renewable energy. And when I get things like that, if it’s a real person on the other side, I’ll give them my time. I’ll talk to them for a few minutes and give them some pointers and give them some guidance.

So I think that the first thing for anybody is just start talking, tell people your desire, it makes it a goal, and then talk to as many people as possible, and then you’ll be able to find out. You’re on path. My firm this year for the first time hired somebody directly out of law school to work with us.

So that can happen. A lot of people who go to law school, though, they also have tremendous debt when they get out and working for a big law firm can be a really good way to get a lot of experience and to help pay off that debt. And you can do some of the work. So yeah, there are many paths that you can follow.

Yeah. Who would not be the right person for corporate law or renewable law? Like what qualities do you see in people that just don’t work well in your industry? [00:22:00] It’s interesting. You need to be patient to do law period, but certainly in renewable energy, there are a lot of, with anything where you’re trying to put deals together, the deal can fall apart at any time.

And so you have to just. Okay. Nothing I could do about that. And then be willing to do something else. I think you need to have the ability to learn. You want to be able to learn new things and you have to be adaptable, adaptable to be able to understand this client’s problem is one thing and this other client’s problem is different and you have to be able to jump back and forth between those.

So those are some things that you’d want. I mean, for my firm, Okay. The real things that we’re looking for. So it’s sort of like I’m answering your question in the reverse to know what we’re looking for. Those are the qualities. And if those are not your qualities, then, you know, go somewhere else perhaps, but we’re looking for kind of pathetic people.

And I think that that’s really the future of renewable energy. Whether you’re a lawyer or you just want to be involved as a business person in this [00:23:00] industry, the drive is really for the future. And so kind and empathetic is really a good way to go. And if you are somebody who has a big ego and just wants to kind of be the center of attention, those are qualities that are not really going to play well.

Okay. Yeah, that’s really helpful. Thinking about what you’ve just said with being kind and empathetic and this human connection, how is AI affecting work for your employees? And how should young people think about that if they’re interested in law of what opportunities will be available for them? That’s a really good question.

And I think AI is something that we’re trying to figure out what its impact is going to be. From what I understand, I think that there’s going to be AI that could potentially displace some people who are in law. For instance, you could see better automation of agreements. And if you can somehow [00:24:00] automate agreements, Yeah.

Yeah. Agreements are usually prepared by more junior lawyers. So like people who are maybe two to five years out of law school will be preparing the main agreements for a deal. And if that initial drafting is done by AI, I think we’re going to have to reimagine the roles for those attorneys so that they can get the experience they need to get to the point at which I think that lawyers are still going to be very valuable, which is advice.

Hey, I can process a lot of information, but I think that ultimately as lawyers, we get paid for having good judgment and trying to steer our client through the icebergs that inevitably appear. And that’s something that you really can only get through experience. And through talking and through reviewing documents, and really, I think that that aspect takes a person.

So for us, we’re trying to anticipate AI and figure out how it’s going to come into our industry and try to be ahead of it. And then try to make sure our attorneys get the training that they [00:25:00] need to keep progressing. Yeah, we haven’t talked about ethics. Does that come into play as far as like a skill set or qualities that you need to bring to the table?

Is it quite a clean line of what you guys will work on and what you won’t, or do you have to look at a case by case of projects that you work on and decide if it’s something that aligns with your values? Definitely. Well, first of all, like, our team needs to be full of ethical people. There are both attorney rules of ethics that everybody needs to follow, and it really relates to being loyal to your clients.

That’s kind of the biggest one and protecting their confidentiality of their information and stuff like that. So ethics is important in law generally, but we have the added one of we’re a mission driven firm and we’re helping the transition from fossil fuel energy to renewable energy. And with that, we will only help companies that are furthering that.

So we [00:26:00] won’t like, let’s just say an oil company might come to us and say, Hey, help us with an issue. If that oil company is serious about renewable energy and the project is a renewable energy project, we would help them. But if they are not, if, if we feel like they’re using us to greenwash them, or let’s say that they’re doing one renewable energy project along with, you know, a thousand new oil projects, then we’re going to say no, thank you.

Okay, so it really does come into play on both those levels. Can you give an example of a young person in your firm or early career professional? What are they doing day to day? What does a day look like? It’d be a great question to ask one of the younger people because I’m pretty far removed from that.

But. In terms of the way that I interact with them, there’s a lot of reviewing emails and communications with other people on the team and clients, so they might get a request from the client to review an agreement and provide their judgment on [00:27:00] that, or they might get a request from a senior lawyer on the team to do the same thing, like, hey, I need you to review this agreement and tell me your comments, tell me what are the risks to our clients and what are the benefits and what provisions you would change.

And then we’ll talk about it and maybe figure out some things, Oh yeah, that’s something good to do. Maybe this one, we can give on that. It’s a risk our client’s willing to take and we try to figure out like between the legal issues and what our client’s needs are, what that agreement should look like to best protect our client.

And then we provide comments back. So there’s constantly for the junior lawyers, constantly interaction with lawyers on the team and with clients to try to navigate those issues that our clients are facing and their agreements. Yeah, what you had mentioned before is your team is remote, correct? You guys don’t go into an office.

Is that something common in law post COVID or are people in the larger firms heading back to offices or what do you see in your [00:28:00] field? It’s much more common now. Obviously, every law firm went remote in 2020, and some have had varying success at bringing lawyers back to the office. I think that they’re across the board.

Law firms will say, okay, we’re having a mandatory three days in the office. And so they start with that, but then people stop going to the office and they still need their help. And so they’re not really enforcing some of those things. We’ve heard from firms that are absolutely going to be enforcing that because the issue is they pay a lot in real estate, they pay a lot for their leases, and they feel like it’s wasted space, and so they want to have people there, and I think a little bit of it is also just partners of law firms Wanted feeling like if I know the person is there, then I know that they’re doing the work for me.

I mean, I see if a person is doing work based on billable hours, either they record time or they don’t. Um, so it’s pretty easy for me to tell. And it’s also [00:29:00] the working remotely is very easy. We have so many ways of communicating with each other. There’s no lag from not being in the office together from my, from my perspective.

Yeah. Well, we’re almost ready to wrap up. I was just wondering if you have resources or what you would recommend somebody who’s interested in this field, what they should start reading, following, or anything like that. I think that the best thing you can do if you really want to get involved in renewable energy, it’s because you understand the importance of the climate crisis that we’re facing.
And there are two authors that I would recommend people look to. One is Michael Mann. He just released a book this year, and I can’t remember the title of it right now, but he’s one of the leaders in the field on reporting that. The other is Bill McKibben. He’s a legend in climate change, renewable energy.

So those two people, almost anything that they read by them will do a very good job of explaining what we face. [00:30:00] And then there’s another book that I really liked that is a positive view of the future, because a lot of people say, oh, you’re worried about climate, you’re just overblowing the risk, you’re saying that we can’t have good things in the future, we’re not going to be able to eat beef, or we’re not going to have lights that come on when we want to, and that is not at all true, but it’s true.

The book that I thought gave me a lot of positivity around the crisis that we’re going to be able to solve it is called Abundance by Peter Diamandis, and I read it about about eight years ago, six or eight years ago, and it really made me optimistic about what we’re doing and gave me more energy to keep on doing what I’m doing.

Yeah, that’s amazing. Those are great resources and I’ll link to them in our show notes, but you’ve been so helpful and given so much insight into what it’s like in your field and I just really appreciate your time. So thank you so much. Well, you’re welcome, Georgia. I really appreciate you reaching out to me on this and it’s [00:31:00] been fun to chat about it and really good to catch up with you.
Yeah, great. Well, thanks so much. I noticed three things that I want to flag from this interview. First, Brad uses phrases such as happier way of practicing law and having fun. His work is serious, but the journey doesn’t have to be that way. He places a high value on his time with his family. Also, a kinder way of doing business is something that Brad is about.

If you did not know he was a lawyer, would you ever think he was talking about a career in law? As he’s equally committed to building a great work environment as he is contributing towards renewable energy. He has built a company that gives him more breathing room, enhancing the quality of his life.

Finding disruptors for good who are ethical leaders like Brad can seem rare, especially in law firms. When you encounter someone like him, stay close. You can learn a lot about doing business in a kinder, more respectful way without limiting your success. And that’s a wrap for [00:32:00] today’s episode of Work That’s Worth It.

Remember. Every conversation we share is designed to empower you to build a career that’s truly worth your time and energy. There are future disruptors out there just like you who would appreciate the conversations in this podcast. Please support me by spreading the word and sharing this episode with a friend or two or visit my website at georgiethoven.com. That’s spelled G E O R G I E N T H O V E N dot com. Until next time, ask yourself. What problems am I solving, and are they worth my valuable time? Your intentional choices today can lead to exponential impact tomorrow. Thanks for listening!