IN MEMORIAM – 5/23/2024
On Thursday, May 23, we lost one of our best people. Brendan Tupa was a lot of things – not least of which was a really good attorney, sure (and to be clear, he’d never talk about himself like that, which only seemed to make him even better). But too often we get hung up on our value of a person based on their tangible output – based on the work they did or on the impact they made on their network. Today, as we mourn the loss of our colleague and friend, we’re thinking about something else: the way Brendan made people feel. He had a way of engaging in conversation that made you feel smarter than you maybe were, as if every word was a commodity and only Brendan understood its true value. He loved solving problems with the input of his peers, a skill that’s rarely taught in law school and has always felt more like an intrinsic gift – a side effect of an upbringing that instilled a belief that everyone had a voice worth sharing. But above all, Brendan loved being a husband and a dad. Any opportunity he had to share a story about his girls was one he wouldn’t miss, and he’d often find a way to compare a situation with a client to something he’d dealt with as a parent – and in the end, it seemed to always come back to one lesson: “you gotta listen before you speak.” That sometimes feels like a rare quality in a great litigator. But it’s a ubiquitous one in a great husband, father, and friend.
Brendan Tupa’s obituary is available here.