Brooks Beard is the Vice President & Deputy General Counsel – Litigation, Employment, and Employee Relations for VMware, where he has global responsibility for litigation, government inquiries and investigations, employment law issues, employee relations, and cybersecurity incidents. He joined the Company in 2014 after spending 18 years in private practice, including 17 years at Morrison & Foerster in its San Francisco office, where he became a partner in January 2005. While at Morrison & Foerster, Mr. Beard had a broad-based litigation practice focusing on intellectual property (patent, trademark, and trade secrets), false advertising, environmental, breach of contract, white collar criminal, and civil rights matters, among other types of matters.

In October 2007, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Mr. Beard to serve as a Commissioner on the San Francisco Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board—a position he held until 2013. And from 2009 until 2014, Mr. Beard sat on the Eco-Entrepreneurship Advisory Council and the Council of Legal Advisors at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mr. Beard received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, his J.D., cum laude, from Vermont Law School, and his LL.M., with distinction, from the Georgetown University Law Center.