Brian P. Brooks – GC Powerlist
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United States 2019

Brian P. Brooks

Chief legal officer | Coinbase

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United States 2019

legal500.com/gc-powerlist/

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Brian P. Brooks

Chief legal officer | Coinbase

About

In September 2018 Brian P. Brooks embarked on the latest chapter of his formidable career by joining Coinbase, the digital currency exchange platform based in in San Francisco, as their chief legal officer. Prior to taking this role, Brooks enjoyed a highly successful four year spell as executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at Fortune 500 company Fannie Mae. Some of his significant achievements at the major financier of mortgage lenders include completing a series of distressed asset transactions. Through these, the company reduced its investment portfolio from more than $900bn to less than $250bn as mandated by the regulator, helping develop a new tax structure to significantly deepen the appetite among foreign investors for Fannie Mae credit risk transfer investments. Brooks is also credited for his contribution to settling major disputes at Fannie Mae. Not only did he guide his department to successfully defend cutting-edge consumer lawsuits under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and other statutes he also play a key role in settling the last of the crisis-era mortgage-backed securities lawsuits brought by Fannie Mae against banks and investment banks that sold defective mortgages, generating billions of dollars for Fannie Mae and taxpayers in the process. Another feature of Brooks’ time at Fannie Mae was his restructuring of the legal department, leading the implementation of its strategic plan designed to reinforce enterprise strategic objectives which has been revered in the industry since: ‘I led Fannie Mae’s legal department through a number of important changes over the past four years. Through a management exercise called Simplify, we identified strategies for changing the way we deliver legal services that saved the company millions of dollars – by discovering work historically done by attorneys that could be performed by paralegals or others, by using electronic document signature protocols instead of manual processes, and by consolidating management layers, among other things’, he explains. Brooks is also praised for exposing his legal team members at Fannie Mae to greater responsibility, by giving them opportunities to work directly with him as well as on special projects of their choosing, in addition to providing opportunities to meet with the chief legal officers of major company clients. He is also credited with being a key driver of diversity at Fannie Mae, helping create a successful partnership in cooperation with the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD) and several other major companies which is being heavily promoted by LCLD around the world. Prior to his time at Fannie Mae, Brooks enjoyed three years at One West Bank where he sold the bank’s mortgage platform and also resolved a series of crisis-era regulatory issues: ‘I joined OneWest Bank in 2011 in the middle of a national crisis around mortgage lending and foreclosures. When other banks paid billions of dollars to settle regulatory claims relating to their foreclosure practices, my team at OneWest was the only bank able to complete an independent foreclosure review, demonstrate a very low error rate, and remediate customers who had been harmed in the foreclosure process. Along the way, we were able to design and launch a loan modification program that was the highest rated and most effective program in the US according to US Treasury Department statistics’, he says when explaining some of his achievements at the Bank.

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