Best-laid plans

Reflecting on the worst year of his professional career, Richard Penfold doesn’t feel he could have done much more to protect himself. ‘I keep asking: “Were there questions I should have asked and didn’t?”,’ he says. ‘I have to say no. There wasn’t anything more I could have done. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing.’

This IP partner’s tale of woe shows that foresight can be overrated too. In 1785, Scottish poet Robert Burns famously observed the tendency for plans to go awry. ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley,’ he wrote. It’s a sentiment Penfold would agree with wholeheartedly. In 2004 he made a lateral move that didn’t work out. Then, in 2008, the same thing happened again, though for very different reasons.

The second was the sucker punch. After a year of negotiations, he joined 125-year-old US law giant Heller Ehrman six weeks before the whole house of cards came crashing down. You might argue that for a considered and successful law firm partner to make that kind of switch is at best cavalier, at worst kamikaze; but if you think it could never happen to you, read on.

Now, as partner for IP at Brown Rudnick, 39-year-old Penfold is relaxed and smiling as he sits in the firm’s client meeting room drinking tea. But look closer, and you see a shadow under his eyes brought on by worry. ‘It got to one point where I wasn’t earning any money,’ he recalls. ‘I understood what my possible exposure could be – lose the house, lose everything.’

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