Entrepreneurial Lawyer | Law School

In 1989, Brent Britton (’94) graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in computer science and was thinking about his future career. He figured he could work as a programmer for IBM or Digital Equipment Corp., a typical path followed by many of his classmates. But Britton was always interested in what was on the cutting edge.

Britton bootstrapped his way through college, working as a systems operator in the campus computing center—”an old mainframe computer with tapes going all over it,” he says—but he also dabbled in new technologies in his free time. He wrote his first AI program as a junior and published a digital humor magazine on the university’s primitive networked computer system. When he read about MIT’s groundbreaking graduate program, Britton decided to apply.

MIT’s Media Lab was founded a few years ago to bring together talented young innovators in engineering, technology and design to solve real-world problems. “It was basically advanced computer science and artificial intelligence,” Britton says. [AI and computing pioneers] Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay were there. Great people doing great things.”

During Britton’s time at MIT, debates about intellectual property (IP) were coming to the fore. In recent years, a series of legal decisions had established the patentability of certain software-related inventions. “I’m a math nerd by nature, so the decisions upset a lot of people, even though I didn’t understand them right away,” Britton admits. “I didn’t know the difference between a patent and a potato, but it seemed like regulators and governments didn’t speak the same language as scientists and engineers. I thought it would be beneficial for someone like me to learn how the law works and fill in the gap.”

After earning his master’s degree from MIT, Britton left his studies to attend Boston University Law School, where he immersed himself in the intricacies of intellectual property law. Over the past 30 years, he has written several books on the fundamentals of intellectual property.Ownership: How intellectual property worksMr. Britton received his J.D. in 2013 and has co-founded numerous technology startups and two successful technology law firms. In 2022, he merged his second Tampa-based law firm, CoreX Legal, with international law firm Bochner Law. Mr. Britton remained as a partner and now leads a group of 40 attorneys at what is now one of the largest intellectual property firms in the Southeast.

Britton’s group at Bochner specializes in providing technology entrepreneurs with representation from start-up to exit, including company formation, venture funding, software licensing, IP strategy and litigation, and dispute resolution. The team boasts a unique mix of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs, positioning the firm as the innovator’s firm. “Our lawyers have been in your shoes and have been on your journey with you,” the site states.

Like Britton, his group’s ethos is one of radical irreverence: Their landing page proclaims in bold blue type: “BE EPIC. BE FEARLESS. BE UNFORGETTABLE.”

“I’m not a suit-and-tie guy,” says Britton, who appears on the firm’s website in a black T-shirt and with intricate arm tattoos. “My legal career has been characterized by my resistance to conformity and my rejection of popular ambiguity. I do the work I want to do, the way I want to do it.”

Ever since he was a kid growing up in Howland, Maine, a sleepy town of about 1,200 people, Britton always had a second job. In middle school, he sold greeting cards door-to-door, and later made money as a DJ at school dances. As an enterprising high school freshman, Britton persuaded his school to help fund the Howland Job Bank, connecting student workers with jobs like mowing lawns and delivering groceries.

With a strong talent for numbers and technology, Britton was immersed in his field both as an undergraduate and at MIT. But Boston University Law School broadened his horizons. “I hadn’t taken many classes where there wasn’t a clear right answer,” Britton says. “I learned that the right answer in law school is to argue both sides of an issue. It was a very fulfilling, different way of thinking.”

Britton decided to focus her research on the intersection of science, technology and intellectual property, eventually Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law Published in digital format.

When Britton enrolled in law school, he expected it to be competitive and cutthroat, but his experience at BU was the exact opposite. “It was a comfortable place, with a lot of cool people and great professors,” he recalls. “They were very supportive of letting students be themselves.”

It worked for Britton, who describes his law school vibe as a “long-haired biker” with mirrored sunglasses. “It was the ’90s. I was like, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam.”

While in law school, Britton worked as a clerk at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends digital civil liberties, before moving to San Francisco after graduating and working briefly as an associate at a Silicon Valley law firm before opening his own independent practice.

In 1997, Britton and two friends started a technology law firm. Starting a private law firm three years after graduating from law school was a bold move, but Britton was confident he understood the tech industry better than many other lawyers. “It was the dot-com bubble, and everything was crazy,” Britton says. “We knew how to do this better than anyone, probably better than anyone, because so few people had been doing this before.”

Britton Silberman & Cervantez LLP quickly grew into a multimillion-dollar firm—one of its early clients was Craig Newmark of Craigslist—and was acquired by another Silicon Valley firm in 2000. “It wasn’t a retirement-level event, but I paid off my law school loans and bought a Steinway,” Britton says.

Britton moved from the West Coast to New York City, where he practiced technology law for several years, before settling in Tampa in 2004. (He’s licensed to practice law in California, Florida and New York. “The bar exam is 42 hours,” he says dryly.)

For the past 30 years, Britton has avidly pursued two of his passions: technology innovation and the law, with plenty of interplay between the two. Though he continues to practice law full time, Britton considers himself an entrepreneur at heart. “I’m not one to blindly accept the status quo,” he says. “I’m always interested in how I can take a situation and make it better, stronger, faster, more efficient, or just make it my own.”

Britton has helped launch dozens of startups, including DealerWizard, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) [software as a service] The company has developed businesses such as Lextrovert (“Legal Education Videos for Etsy”), which helps car dealerships manage their inventory, and VerifIP (“IP audit and due diligence tool”), and he’s seen some profitable exits as well as failures.

Like many veteran entrepreneurs, Britton embraces failure with optimism. His painful failures and hard-won lessons are now reflected in sage business advice he gives his legal clients, such as the absolute necessity of conducting rigorous market validation before bringing a product to market. “I’ve launched multiple companies on the premise of what I thought was a good idea,” Britton says. “But then I launched and nobody came. No one came to the party because I never asked the audience what they wanted.”

Britton advises inventors to curb their tendency to be secretive: “The first thing I tell my clients is, of course, take basic steps to protect your IP and source code, but after that, get out of stealth mode. Go to a lot of people and share your product. Interview potential customers and ask them, ‘Do you like this? Would you pay for it? If not, how should we change it?’ This is what makes or breaks your startup.”

Looking to the future, Britton, like many others, sees artificial intelligence as the next frontier in tech law. Within a few years, he predicts, practicing law without the use of AI will be considered misconduct. “AI won’t replace lawyers yet,” Britton says. “But lawyers who use AI tools will vastly outperform those who don’t.” Rather than being disruptive, he says, AI will be a “tsunami of creative destruction.”

Britton is eager to ride that wave. Among his latest ventures are two artificial intelligence startups: Idyllic, an AI tool for trademark risk analysis and other legal functions, and Zenzio, an AI-powered salesperson.

Despite the dire predictions of AI pessimists, Britton approaches the future with an innovator’s sense of possibility. “I couldn’t be an entrepreneur lawyer if I didn’t have a deep belief in the good, kind, compassionate spirit of human beings,” Britton says. “I’ve always believed that technology and startup law is the future of it all, and I haven’t been wrong for the last 30 years. There’s no limit to what’s to come. Innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship — creating, building, and growing — define the essence of what it means to be human.”