Giving

Forging His Own Path

Robert T. Butler scholarship allows an engineer to pursue IP law career.

The answer, thanks to the Robert T. Butler Scholarship Fund, was yes. 

“I know for a fact that it would not have been possible without the scholarship,” Brunner says. “I needed it to make financial sense.”

Now entering his third year at BU Law, Brunner recently finished a summer associate program at WilmerHale in Boston, where he plans to begin practicing IP litigation next fall.

The career shift is a dream that’s been a long time coming for the Milwaukee-area native.

Since graduating from high school, Brunner has followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Matt. He entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s engineering program a year behind his brother, even moving into his brother’s former apartment for his final year.

When Brunner graduated from UW, a promising job opened up in Boston, at his brother’s company. Yet Jeremy wondered whether he should once again go along behind.

“I kept doing the same things he was doing, but that last one was a bridge too far,” he says. “I didn’t want to be doing the same thing as my brother. I wanted to forge my own path.”

Still, he was drawn to Boston. He decided to follow his brother to Johnson Controls, an international company that produces fire, HVAC, and security equipment for buildings. Now, he is glad he did. He fell in love with the city and met his future wife.

While working at Johnson Controls, and with everyone working at home at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brunner plotted how to strike out in a new direction. On a whim, he says, he decided to take the LSAT.

After doing well on the test, he decided to take the next step and apply to law school, intending to leverage his engineering background by studying IP law. BU Law—known for having one of the top IP law programs in the country—was the only option he considered. 

“It was always going to be BU Law,” he says. “At the time, it felt like a life-and-death risk, but I haven’t regretted it for a second. It worked out just about as good as it could have.”

He credits Senior Lecturer Marni Goldstein Caputo’s 1L Lawyering Program class with helping him brush up his rusty writing skills and begin thinking and drafting like a lawyer. Just as all engineers have a certain mindset, lawyers have certain ways of thinking that are specific to their profession. “It was definitely an adjustment for me.”

He enjoyed the class so much that in his second year, he became a lawyering fellow for Caputo, acting as a mentor and teacher for the next crop of law students.

Thanks to the scholarship, Brunner could also take advantage of BU Law’s many experiential learning opportunities. Especially rewarding was the clinical experience at the BU/MIT Startup Law Clinic [now the Student Innovations Law Clinic], which helps student entrepreneurs complete the legal work needed to form their companies.

“It’s not the area of law that I’m going to practice, but still, that client counseling, client interface, all those types of opportunities are great,” he says. “I encourage anybody who’s coming to law school to take as much of those experiential opportunities as possible.”

He started law school thinking he would pursue a career in patent prosecution since that’s where his engineering background would be most valuable. However, as he gained more exposure to the law, completing his first summer associate program at Foley and Lardner in Milwaukee, he realized he preferred patent litigation.

Although he won’t draw as much on his engineering background as a patent litigator, Brunner anticipates that his science base and prior workforce experience will be an asset to his future career.

Scholarship founder Robert T. Butler (’55) had a varied career himself before he passed away last year. Butler practiced law and then went into the automobile business, later buying a Subaru distributorship and becoming chairman of Subaru Distributors Corporation. Like Brunner, Butler, too, came to Boston at the urging of his older brother.

Looking ahead at the new path he has forged in the legal profession and the life he has built with his soon-to-be wife, Brunner has nothing but gratitude. He is only steps away from a new career, which, thanks to the scholarship, he can enter with the financial freedom to think about other milestones, like buying a house.

“None of it would be possible without the scholarship,” he says.

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