In 2021, IdeaMensch interviewed Louis Lehot shortly after he joined Foley & Lardner LLP. Five years on, he answers the same questions again.
Louis Lehot is a corporate partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, based in the firm’s Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offices, where he advises founders, boards, and investors on M&A, growth equity, venture capital, and IPOs, taking companies from garage to global. Chambers USA has ranked him in Venture Capital every year since he joined the firm in 2021, and nationwide in Startups and Emerging Growth every year since 2025. JD Supra readers have named him a Top Author in M&A three years running, most recently ranking him number three in the country. SuperLawyer Magazine has named him a Northern California SuperLawyer in the category of mergers and acquisitions for five years running. He publishes The Weekly Silicon Valley Docket and The Growth Docket and is a two-time faculty member at Stanford Directors’ College. This interview updates an interview Louis Lehot gave to IdeaMensch in 2021, and continues chronicling Louis Lehot’s journey in big law and his entrepreneurial law practice.
You gave IdeaMensch an interview in 2021, just after joining Foley & Lardner. Five years on, how did the bet pay off?
Better than I could have written it. In 2021, I told you that joining Foley was the logical outgrowth of the boutique I had founded, and that my colleagues and I were excited about what came next. What came next was the strangest half-decade in the history of the innovation economy: the 2021 mania, the 2022 and 2023 winter, and then the AI wave that is now rebuilding everything. Through all of it, the model held. Based on our performance, Chambers has increasingly ranked our team, which I care about because it is researched independently, one client interview at a time. But the number I am proudest of is quieter: how many of my clients from ten and twenty years ago are still my clients today, sometimes on their second and third companies.
Where did the idea for your practice come from?
From a door that someone held open in 1993. I was an undergraduate at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and Shearman & Sterling gave me a job as a clerk. I stayed as a paralegal, came back as a summer associate, and became a lawyer at the firm in 2000. Thirty-three years around this profession, and more than twenty-five as a lawyer, all trace to that first job. The idea itself came later, in Silicon Valley: founders do not need a lawyer for a transaction, they need a partner for a journey. The journey runs from garage to global, from ideation to formation, financing to scaling, and scaling to exit. Someone should build a practice shaped like the hero’s journey of a startup founder instead of shaped like the org chart of a law firm. That is what I have been building ever since.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
The architecture has not changed since 2021, because it works: sleep like it is your job, fifteen minutes of meditation and gratitude in the morning, a short hard workout, and green smoothies made in batches on Sunday. What has changed is what happens between nine and six. I protect one writing block every week, no matter what, because publishing The Weekly Silicon Valley Docket every week for years has become the best professional discipline I have ever adopted. Writing is thinking. If I cannot explain this week’s market to a founder in plain English, I do not understand it yet. The other discipline is unchanged and non-negotiable: presence. When I am with a client, that conversation is my only task on earth. People never forget how you make them feel, and what they should feel with their lawyer is covered.
How do you bring ideas to life?
The same way I said five years ago, because it is still true. Boil the idea down to its integral parts, build collaboratively, make sure you are solving a problem that actually needs solving, and persevere through the inevitable roadblocks by keeping the vision in sight. As Peter Block wrote, the answer to how is yes. The one thing I would add after five more years: ship it smaller and sooner than feels comfortable. A published imperfect thing beats a perfect thing in a drawer, every time.
What is one trend that excites you?
In 2021, I told IdeaMensch that demand for artificial intelligence would catalyze massive capital deployment. I will take that one as a win, but honestly, nobody predicted the scale. What excites me now is that AI has moved from demos to infrastructure. The deals crossing my desk are not concept rounds anymore; they are data centers, power, chips, and the companies wiring intelligence into old industries. I had a front-row seat advising Mirantis in its sale to IREN, an AI infrastructure company, and the deal taught me that the picks-and-shovels phase of this revolution is just beginning. The second thing exciting me is quieter: Congress expanded the qualified small business stock rules in 2025, raising the exclusion to fifteen million dollars and adding partial benefits starting at three years. The founder math just got better, and most founders have not noticed yet.
What is one habit that makes you more productive?
Still the one my grandfather taught me. He immigrated from Sweden right before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, survived the quake, the fire, two world wars, and a depression, and never once let bad news be the story of his life. Positive thinking plus contributing value to every relationship, solicited or not. The modern version of his habit, for me, is this: teach one thing every week. The newsletter, the videos, the classes at Stanford Directors’ College, the mentoring. When you commit to teaching weekly, you are forced to keep learning weekly, and the relationships compound on their own.
What advice would you give your younger self?
The kid growing up in Oakland worried whether he would ever impact the world in a meaningful way. I would tell him what I told IdeaMensch in 2021, and I will keep saying it because it took me decades to learn: be true to yourself, and stop worrying about the future so long as you remain true to your core. I would add one thing now. The door held open for you in 1993 is the whole story. Spend your career holding doors, and the meaning takes care of itself.
Tell us something that is true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
AI will create more work for great lawyers, not less. Everyone believes automation shrinks the profession. I believe the opposite, because I have watched what actually happens: when the cost of doing a deal falls, people do more deals. More formation, more financings, more experiments, more exits. The commodity work disappears, and it should. What is left is judgment, and the demand for judgment grows with the volume of decisions. The lawyers in trouble are the ones selling hours. The lawyers who will thrive are the ones selling outcomes.
What is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
Make qualified introductions, expecting nothing back. Knowing people is different from connecting them well. Twice a week, minimum, I put two people in an email who should know each other, with one sentence on why. It costs me ten minutes. Some of my most important clients, and several lifelong friends, began as the beneficiary or the subject of one of those emails. Optimism and generosity have a ripple effect; beam them out and they return in amounts exponentially greater. I called it karma in 2021. I still do.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your practice?
I systematized what I learned from the burnout episode I described in my first interview. Back then, a consultant and I discovered that no single activity drove my practice; it was volume of presence, kindness at scale. The strategy since 2021 has been to make that presence compound: publish every week, teach every quarter, show up at the events that matter, and follow up so consistently that people are never surprised to hear from me, only glad. A practice, it turns out, is a garden. Water on schedule.
What is one failure you had, and how did you overcome it?
The one I will keep telling, because young lawyers need to hear it. In 2008 I had concentrated my practice on two clients and one senior partner, and when the recession hit, that concentration cost me my shot at partner at the firm where I was. Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be. I spent months meeting every firm and client who would see me, honed the pitch with every rejection, and rebuilt on a platform where I could serve my own clients at scale. The practice that exists today, and everything Chambers has ranked since, grew out of the worst professional year of my life.
What is the best 100 dollars you recently spent?
A stack of hardcover copies of The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho. I give one to every first-time founder I take on. It has nothing to do with term sheets and everything to do with the journey they just signed up for.
What is one book you recommend, and your favorite quote?
The same book, still. Coelho reminds us that the extraordinary is always found in the ordinary ways of everyday people. And the same quote: we must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Five more years of deals, downturns, and reinventions have only made it truer.
Key Learnings
The AI economy’s picks-and-shovels phase is creating a generation of infrastructure deals, and founder economics quietly improved with the 2025 QSBS expansion.
Teach one thing every week; the learning and the relationships compound on their own.
When the cost of deals falls, deal volume rises: sell judgment and outcomes, not hours.
Make two qualified introductions a week expecting nothing back.
Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be; the best practices are rebuilt, not inherited.
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