The law is a profession that venerates precedent, caution and stability. Craig W. Johnson stood apart not only as one of the profession's most successful practitioners, but also as a trailblazing innovator. Johnson, 62, died on October 3 in Palo Alto, four days after he suffered a massive stroke.
Johnson was born in Pasadena, Calif., and graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1968. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and worked as a systems computer programmer before attending Stanford Law School. Graduated in 1974, he joined the Palo Alto law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati as its 14th attorney and helped establish the firm's strong reputation as consort to high-tech companies.
In 1993, he made his first foray out of traditional law practice when he launched the Venture Law Group. Instead of naming the firm with the traditional list of partner names, he created a "branded" firm focused on small, high-growth companies. By taking equity in lieu of some fees from entrepreneurial companies still at the pre-public stage, Venture Law Group was itself a Silicon Valley-style innovation, one that profited from high-tech companies, including Yahoo, drugstore.com and Hotmail. Johnson sold the firm in 2003.
Johnson was called one of Silicon Valley's top 25 "movers and shakers" by BusinessWeek magazine in 1997. "He genuinely cared about seeing others around him succeed," says Venture Law Group alumnus Glen Van Ligten.
With his wife, RoseAnn M. Rotandaro, JD '95, and Andrea Chavez, MS '98, Johnson in 2008 created a radical model for legal practice, Virtual Law Partners. "It's clear to me that the large-law-firm model is broken," Johnson said in an interview in 2009. Virtual Law Partners would be a "distributed, web-based" firm staffed by experienced attorneys who mostly worked out of their homes. The structure, by limiting overhead, allowed the firm to charge clients less than traditional firms. The firm, with 40 attorneys at the time of Johnson's death, intends to continue developing this model.
Johnson is survived by Rotandaro, with whom he had just spent a European honeymoon; his father, Roger Miles Johnson; his brother, Brian Johnson; and his two sons by a previous marriage, Scott and Matthew Johnson.
