Ari Kaplan interviews Gabe Galanda, the co-founder and managing lawyer of Galanda Broadman, an Indian Country law firm with headquarters in Seattle.

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and the genesis of Galanda Broadman.

Gabe Galanda: I’m an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian confederation of Mendocino County, California. I descend from the Nomlaki and Concow tribes of our confederation, and was born and raised in Port Angeles, Washington, which is on the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington state here in the great Pacific Northwest. I went to the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where I concentrated on Indian law. In 2000, I started practicing at a mid-sized firm in downtown Seattle and was elevated to equity member.

In 2010, Anthony Broadman and I founded Galanda Broadman PLLC, which now has eight lawyers with offices in Seattle, Yakima, Washington, and Bend, Oregon. It is our privilege to represent tribal governments, tribal enterprises, and tribal citizens in all matters of controversy, regulation and business. We’re very grateful to our clients for the opportunity to serve them.

Ari Kaplan: How did you know the area in which you wanted to practice so early in your career?

Gabe Galanda: I knew I wanted to be a lawyer since I was in high school because I worked at a law office in my hometown as a receptionist and the firm’s two partners inspired me by the way they practiced in a very community-based way. As a tribal citizen, I knew that my legal career would focus on representing tribal interests. I didn’t know exactly what a career in Indian law would look like, but I was very fortunate to know at a relatively young age exactly what I wanted to be, a lawyer, and exactly who I wanted to represent, tribal clients.

Ari Kaplan: You were an equity member of a prominent regional firm. How did you make the decision to leave and start your own practice?

Gabe Galanda: The way I see it, the decision was made for me on Valentine’s Day 2010. I came home from a long day at that old firm and my wife told me she was pregnant with twins. One of my immediate reactions was to tell her that I needed to change firms, realizing there was no way I could meet the demands of equity membership, tribal practice group management, and board of directors leadership in a law firm and still come home, and be any semblance of the dad and husband I wanted to be.

Serendipitously, my partner’s wife finished her residency and the best offer she received was in a hospital in Bend, Oregon so he had to move. So, on April 10, 2010, we started Galanda Broadman, which at about the peak of the great recession, but we made the leap at that moment in history and we were fortunate that a number of tribal clients made that leap with us, which gave us a bit of a soft landing.

The rest is history.

Ari Kaplan: You’ve been involved in some high-profile matters. How do you choose the cases on which you’re going to focus?

Gabe Galanda: It is more about the Indian clients with which we’ve had longstanding relationships that choose us rather than us choosing them or their cases. While there are certainly times we cannot or do not accept cases, our highest profile cases tend to result from trusted referrals from tribal clients with whom we share a common value set. In terms of our focus and choosing cases, we watch and listen very carefully to what’s happening throughout Indian country. We look for opportunities that will help us advance budding social justice causes that will eventually benefit all of Indian country. For example, we took on tribal disenrollment before any other law firm would do that in any concerted way, and took on Indian prisoner religious freedoms seeing the rise in religious discrimination throughout state and local prisons. We’ve now taken on federal state and local law enforcement officers and agencies.

Ari Kaplan: You mentioned tribal disenrollment. What is it and can you describe its impact?

Gabe Galanda: Tribal disenrollment is a process designed by the United States over the last 200 years, but unknowingly, co-opted by tribal governments and tribal officials that leads to Indians being exiled from their own tribal communities. Since the advent of Indian gaming and its success over the last couple of decades many Indians losing their identities, livelihoods, and sense of belonging by way of this process. Indian gaming represents relatively new wealth in Indian country that has, unfortunately, has caused greed to grip certain tribal politicians, who create cohorts of tribal members or factions or tribal members to then get rid of their own relatives. Over the last five years, we have represented about 600 Indians from Washington, Oregon, and California, among other areas, in these matters.

In the process, we have re-educated ourselves about what it really means and does not mean to belong to a tribal community, and have also tried to help re-educate Indian country about those ideals before it’s too late because what we’re witnessing really is Native Americans self-terminating or self-annihilating with devices created by the federal government.

Ari Kaplan: As you develop in your career at this stage, is there anything you would have done differently?

Gabe Galanda: One thing I would do differently is heed a warning I was given before I made the leap to create our firm, which was to expect that relatively trivial things would be the source of great consternation and heartache with former partners. I was naive to think that everything would just be fine. Over time, everything has worked out and I’m still great friends with lot of my former partners, whom I consider mentors. In that moment, however, I sort of underestimated the challenges of parting ways.

Ari Kaplan: How do you divide your time between growing a thriving practice and performing the work for your clients?

Gabe Galanda: I don’t think that there’s an obvious division between business development and practicing law. In fact, serving our tribal clients is our best mode of business development. We strive to provide the highest quality legal service and the most zealous of advocacy for our Indian clients. With our absolute best efforts at all times and the results that occasionally come from those efforts comes more opportunity to serve more Indian clients. The best mode of business development can’t be divided from the practice as it is the practice.

Beyond that, we place a lot of emphasis on our social media marketing, which is a 24/7/365 effort. The hallmark of my career and now my law firm’s business development is and always has been writing. It dates back to when I wrote my first Indian Law article in 2002. Today, whether it is a Tweet or an occasional blog post that one of my partners or associates is writing, we share and allow our ideas to reach as far and wide as we can in Indian country. It is also important to realize that things do not happen overnight. It takes relentless effort over an extended period of time and, of course, the anchor of that effort has to be the practice of law itself.

Ari Kaplan: What recommendations do you have for lawyers seeking to build a practice or students interested in striking out on their own?

Gabe Galanda: First, be authentic. Second, be relentless. By authentic, I mean you have to be yourself. Folks don’t want to associate with somebody who is trying to be something other than himself or herself. In the legal market, being anything other than authentic is simply going to repel people from you rather than draw them in. And, being yourself is the only way you’ll ever find passion in the law and without passion, I suggest that a lawyer is simply mediocre. Unless you’re passionate, you will never play to your ultimate strengths. You will always be less than your absolute best. Passion is key and that comes with authenticity. The marriage of passion and authenticity will result in your best legal work. I believe you have to relentlessly think about your career every single day of your life. Even on vacation, you need to be thinking about your mode of success, your potential for success, and how you’re going to realize that potential.

Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology.