Brad Smith Biography
Brad Smith is an American attorney and business executive who has served as Microsoft’s Vice Chairman since 2021 and President since 2015. From 2002 to 2015, he was a senior vice president and General Counsel.
Brad Smith Age and Birthday
He is 63 years old as of 17 January 2022. He was born in 1959 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.
Brad Smith Family
His father was an engineer and manager at Wisconsin Bell who relocated the family several times throughout the state. Smith attended Appleton West High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he was student body president and editor of the school paper; as class president, he negotiated one of his first deals, a school hall pass system.
Who is Brad Smith Wife? – Marriage
Smith met his wife Kathy Surace-Smith at Princeton University when they were both undergraduates. Smith earned a B.A. in 1981 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs after completing a 199-page senior thesis titled “The Politics of Refugees: The Development and Promotion of International Refugee Law.”
He and his wife both graduated from Princeton in 1981 and went on to Columbia Law School. They married in 1983 and studied international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland during the 1983-1984 school year before returning to Columbia to graduate in 1985. Surace-Smith is the vice president and general counsel at NanoString Technologies in Seattle. They have two children: a son born in 1992 and a daughter born in 1995.
What is Brad Smith’s salary?
Smith’s 2020 compensation included $860,000 in salary, nearly $3.3 million in non-equity incentives, a post-Dodd Frank form of cash pay, and approximately $12.4 million in stock awards, according to figures disclosed in a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
When did Brad Smith join Microsoft?
From 2001 to 2014, Craig Smith served as Microsoft’s general counsel. He has been described as accommodating to competitors and regulators, and he has advocated for diversity in the company’s legal department. The National Law Journal named him one of “America’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers” in 2013. He is regarded as “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large” and has received praise for his diplomacy. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, promoted Craig Smith to the president and chief legal officer in 2015.
He is in charge of Microsoft’s corporate, external, and legal affairs, as well as serving as the company’s chief compliance officer. Smith announced the launch of Microsoft Philanthropies, a branch of the company dedicated to donating money and services to the public good, three months into his new position. In 2017, he formed a partnership with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which the Office described as “groundbreaking” and “landmark.”
Brad Smith Career
Smith’s first job out of law school was as a law clerk for United States federal judge Charles Miller Metzner. He joined the law firm, Covington & Burling, in Washington, D.C. in 1986. He only had one requirement for the job: he had his own computer. He was the first in the firm to have one, which ran Microsoft Word version 1.0. Smith spent three years in Washington, D.C., and four years in London, where he ran Covington’s software practice. He became a partner in 1993.
Smith is the chairman of the non-profit Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which he co-founded in 2008 with actress Angelina Jolie. KIND provides pro bono legal assistance to unaccompanied immigrant children facing deportation in eight major US cities. It is supported by Microsoft and hours donated by law firms and corporate departments from across the country.
Smith was the chair and a founding board member of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, a group of corporate chief legal officers and law firm managing partners committed to increasing diversity in the legal profession, from 2009 to 2016.
Smith is the chairman of the board of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship, which provides grants to low- and middle-income students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as health care. Since its inception in 2011, the public-private partnership has raised $190 million, including $35 million from Microsoft, $25 million from Boeing, and $25 million from the Washington State Legislature.
He collaborates on other charitable endeavors with his wife, Kathy Surace-Smith. They chaired the 2011 United Way campaign in King County, Washington, raising $120 million. They are also big fans of their alma mater, Columbia Law School: Surace-Smith is a Columbia University trustee and co-chairs the school’s Annual Fund; in 2004, the couple established the Smith Family Opportunity Scholarship, which helps less-represented international students attend the school; and in 2017, they became co-chairs of the school’s fundraising campaign, and made a $1.25 million gift to the Columbia Human Rights Clinic. The Smiths will donate an additional $5 million to the Human Rights Clinic in February 2022.
