Juanita Brooks, a litigator and principal in Fish & Richardson's San Diego office, knows what it's like to be treated as less than an equal by other lawyers.

In the late 1970s, Brooks joined the Federal Defenders of San Diego, where she represented offenders who were charged with federal crimes but financially unable to hire lawyers. Brooks said the program is race and gender blind. However, some lawyers she faced in courts were not.

“As a young Latina in San Diego, I was constantly mistaken for the interpreter,” Brooks said, noting that other lawyers would call her over to interpret for them. “It never occurred to them that I was a lawyer.”

Brooks said hard times in her early life taught her “to be a hard worker and keep her eye on the ball.” Her father, who was in the Air Force, left his wife and two children when Brooks was 9 years old, forcing her mother to support the family.

“We kind of scraped by,” she said. “It wasn't easy.”

Brooks wanted to go to college and enrolled in San Diego State University, where a professor encouraged her to go to law school. She did, graduating from Yale Law School in 1977. In 1980, Brooks became the first female criminal defense attorney in San Diego to hang out her shingle. Specializing in white-collar criminal defense, Brooks set up her private practice in an old house where several male attorneys formerly with Federal Defenders had offices. Brooks said she referred cases to her male colleagues, but they rarely referred cases to her. “I was told men had families to support,” she recalled.

Brooks began doing civil litigation, including patent cases, after joining Mckenna & Cuneo in 1993. She moved to Fish in 2000 and now has a complex litigation practice, with an emphasis on patent litigation.

In February of this year, Brooks led an all-female team representing Gilead Sciences at a hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to convince the appellate court to back a trial judge's decision to throw out a $200 million jury award against their client for the infringement of two Merck & Co. patents.

In its April 25 opinion in Gilead Sciences Inc. v. Merck & Co., the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment that the patents were unenforceable because of Merck's ”unclean hands.” The lower court found that a Merck patent prosecutor had breached an ethical firewall in prosecuting the company's patents and gave false testimony about his role in a deposition.

But Brooks has been much more than a litigator at Fish.

“She's a champion of women,” said Betsy Flanagan, a principal in Fish's Minneapolis office. In her first “big-time trial experience,” Flanagan was second chair at a trial for which Brooks was the first chair. Flanagan said she was able to put on witnesses and cross-examine them while Brooks worked with her to ensure her success. Brooks did that, Flanagan said, despite carrying a heavy load herself.

As a member of the firm's management committee from 2005-2008 and again from 2016 to the present, Brooks has backed policies changing the culture and diversity of Fish and becoming blueprints for similar policies at other law firms. For more than 10 years, Fish has had a formal diversity initiative that Brooks helped to design. That includes its 1L Diversity Fellowship Program that provides fellowships to first-year law students. Brooks created a forum in Fish's San Diego office to enable female attorneys to meet and share their concerns and successes. The forum was implemented in other Fish offices and was the precursor of the firm's EMPOWER initiative.

In addition, Brooks was the driving force behind Fish's creative and flexible reduced hours policy and encouraged Fish to become one of the original 15 firms participating in the OnRamp Fellowship Program that matches experienced female lawyers returning to the legal profession with firms for a one-year paid fellowship. Brooks has done all that and more while raising two children. She is married to attorney Michael Pancer.