Neal Brendel, a firm partner for over thirty years until his retirement, has passed away after an extended and courageous battle against a punishing disease. Neal lived a full life as a family man, a professional, an athlete and sportsman, a friend to many, and a leader in every sphere he entered. All lives — even great lives like Neal’s — end. Neal’s just ended too soon.
Neal arrived at the firm’s Pittsburgh office in 1979, a year before my own arrival. At that point, his career as an All American collegiate wrestler was evident in his athletic presence as he walked the halls. A recently published retrospective on wrestling at Yale dating back to 1903 featured Neal, the only wrestler in school history to participate in four NCAA championships, as “a man of class and humility despite being tough as nails on the mat.” Substitute “in the courtroom” for “on the mat” and you have an apt description of Neal’s legal career. As a senior, Yale awarded Neal the William Neely Mallory Award as the athlete “who best represents the highest ideals of American Sportsmanship.”
After his decorated career as a collegiate wrestler at Yale, Neal took up the sport of rugby late in his Yale career and while in law school at the University of Virginia. This developed into a passion, and Neal played on the United States Eagles from 1983 to 1987 and competed in the inaugural Rugby World Cup in 1987 in Australia. Neal was a partner of K&L at the time. We were enormously proud that Neal represented his country in a sport that other nations had first mastered. How many law partners do you know who have been at the pinnacle of two sports in their native land? I knew one — Neal, who later was the first National Team Player to serve as Chairman of the USA Rugby Football Union and the US representative on the International Rugby Board (now World Rugby).
Neal was a great lawyer — smart, savvy, client focused, learned and at once intuitive and analytical. Over the years, Neal and I practiced law together and he was unfailingly brilliant and courageous as we traveled across the US from courtroom to courtroom, often joined by our younger colleagues including Tom Reiter and Jim Segerdahl. Because of the nature of the cases we brought, we would typically be opposed by dozens of law firms, including some of America’s greatest firms — Skadden Arps, Simpson Thacher, Ropes & Gray and others. Our clients usually prevailed, in no small part because of the quality of Neal’s advocacy, his strategic and tactical thinking, and the team spirit that he infused into our enterprise.
Neal and I, often joined by Reiter and Segerdahl, would occasionally enjoy a drink after work. At one such session in the mid-1990s I asked Neal, who was still a large and well-constructed man, whether we should take up the sport of long distance running. Fortified in the moment, we shook hands on the proposition — our friends laughed at the very thought — and later we were too stubborn and embarrassed to back off our improvident deal. As I labored through our training runs, Neal advised me to “welcome pain as an old friend.” In 1995, he and I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington and the following year we ran the Athens Marathon in Greece. As we launched our second run on the Plains of Marathon, I marveled as the formidable Neal Brendel ran side-by-side with veteran and quite slender international marathoners where 2,500 years earlier Athenian warriors had fought to preserve their civilization. Neal finished the race an hour before I did. I’ve attached our photo at the finish line in Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. Neal is the relaxed fellow in the USA Rugby cap.
About a dozen years later, Neal and I were again enjoying a drink after work when I suggested that it was not ideal that the firm’s international expansion had not extended to the Middle East. Rising to the challenge, and after securing the appropriate domestic approvals, Neal was off and running as the founder of our Dubai office, not without personal and professional sacrifice in the early days, where he developed from scratch an active international arbitration practice and earned the friendship, respect and admiration of a new circle of colleagues. Over a decade later, our Middle East offices in Dubai and Doha stand out as unusually successful for a US-based global firm. This is a tribute to Neal and to Michael Johns, our transformational leader from London, now retired, as well as the extraordinary personnel in each of those offices.
Neal and his wife, Pam Rollings, a dear friend to many at the firm, met at Yale in the 1970s, and continued their romance through Law School in Virginia and over the decades thereafter, including for many years when Neal was a partner at K&L and Pam served in the same capacity at a rival firm. Pam’s devotion to Neal through his final ordeal models the essence of love. I’ve attached a photo of Neal and Pam in happy times. Their boys, Ross and Kurt, are exceptional reminders of their amazing parents, and Neal and Pam were joined over the years by a wonderful daughter-in-law and a beautiful granddaughter. Neal’s brothers and sister are cut from the same cloth as Neal, and we offer the entire family our deepest sympathies.
One final note: In one of our last conversations, his voice a whisper, Neal said it meant so much that folks had reached out to him with calls and notes as he approached the end. Many of those calls and notes came from his friends across the firm — a reminder that the ties that bind extend beyond the practice of law.
Rest In Peace, Neal. You were one of a kind — unforgettable, and a Rock of Gibraltar for friends in need. To Pam and the family please accept our thoughts and prayers, and thank you for sharing Neal with us for all of those years.
Peter J. Kalis
Chairman Emeritus, K&L Gates
