Lawyer Found Way Back to Work One National Park at a Time

When he stepped down as the top lawyer at Gilead Sciences Inc. two years ago, Brett Pletcher hopped in his RV and drove “west of the Dakotas” to explore.

After spending months on the road—Arches National Park and nearby Moab, Utah, were favorite stops—he’s back at a publicly-traded biopharmaceutical company, Cytokinetics Inc., after a stint at the law firm Gunderson Dettmer.

Pletcher, 56, and his wife, Jennifer, felt in their travels they were visiting the world but not participating in it. He missed the “intellectual challenges” of working in the C-suite and the teamwork that comes with mentoring colleagues.

“By having taken a break, I had a chance to rest and probably extended my career by being able to come back with a different mindset,” Pletcher said.

As lawyers enjoy a long Labor Day weekend, and perhaps have a few days to decompress, they can ponder if they would choose a path Pletcher did—retire from a successful and lucrative career of more than a quarter century only to boomerang after learning vacation can turn into work if done long enough.

Goals have always been important to Pletcher.

After graduating from one of the nation’s premier law schools at the University of California, Berkeley, making partner at Gunderson Dettmer, and serving as legal chief for one of Big Pharma’s top 20 companies by market value, Pletcher felt satisfied in the career boxes he had checked off.

Like many law department leaders in recent years, he was also exhausted. After helping Gilead navigate pandemic-related challenges—the company’s remdesivir in 2020 became the first drug formally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the coronavirus—he needed a breather to clear his head.

“I honestly didn’t know if I was done or not, but I was done right now,” Pletcher recalled thinking. “When you’re going 100 miles per hour for 27 years, you don’t really know who you are when you’re not working.”

RV Time

The Pletchers began their journey, dubbed “Living Our Someday,” and documented many of their stops. There was Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, Dante’s View in Death Valley, California, and Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.

“This park is awe inspiring,” they wrote from Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

At Valley of Fire State Park in Overton, Nevada, the Pletchers reported “wide open desert mountain vistas full of reds, pinks, yellows, oranges, browns and everything in between.”

Pletcher’s RV

Photographer: Brett Pletcher

The couple shared images of their travels in a Winnebago Ekko RV on social media, citing scenic vistas and glamping tales.

Pletcher’s journey of personal discovery meant unlearning the reflex to check email every two minutes. He enjoyed the freedom of being able to visit places and see things he had wanted to experience for a long time.

“Retirement is not really an event—it’s not one day where they hand you your gold watch and you go off and know what you’re doing for the rest of your life,” Pletcher said. “It’s an iterative process.”

About a year ago, during a lull in his travels, Pletcher’s retirement road took one of those twists.

Work was beckoning.

Back to Big Law

Pletcher in July 2023 rejoined Gunderson Dettmer, where he began his career and had made partner two decades ago in Silicon Valley.

His return to the firm, known for its emerging companies and startup expertise—and where he had worked until Gilead hired him in 2005—was in a part-time of counsel role. The job allowed Pletcher to work from his home in the Las Vegas area. He assisted general counsel and CEOs at client companies.

“I would often take calls about a public company, life sciences, or governance issue,” he said. “It’s something I really enjoy doing and doesn’t take a lot of time.”

Then this past April, Sung Lee, a Gilead veteran and friend of Pletcher’s, joined Cytokinetics as its new chief financial officer. Robert Blum, the longtime chief executive officer at Cytokinetics, had been courting Pletcher since he left Gilead.

Cytokinetics had been without a permanent general counsel since Mark Schlossberg retired two years ago. Now with Lee on board, the company—known for its experimental heart drug aficamten—felt like it could be home for Pletcher.

He liked the idea of joining a new organization where he was comfortable with his co-workers and would able to make a difference with skills he honed at Gilead.

He started Aug. 19 with a $100,000 signing bonus, Cytokinetics disclosed in a securities filing. Going forward Pletcher will receive an annual base salary of $560,000 with restricted stock grants and options valued at roughly $4.6 million.

Lessons Learned

Being able to mentor a new generation of law department leaders is Pletcher’s way of paying forward the lessons he’s learned over the years.

“Most of the time people are on the right track, they just need someone to tell them,” he said about the advisory work at Gunderson Dettmer he hopes to continue. “When you’re a GC there are things that come up you’ve never seen before, so it’s nice to call someone and say, ‘Where do I start with this?’”

When he left Gilead, Pletcher always felt he would use his first foray into retirement as a reboot. During his subsequent travels throughout the American West, he learned that the post-work process is far from linear.

Pletcher didn’t want to close off any future possibilities—be it volunteering, academia, or legal practice—but knew time would give him the space to find himself. The two years away that he took are probably the maximum amount of time he would recommend for those hoping to return to the workforce before their professional abilities stagnate.

“When you retire, you’ll have some ideas about what you want to do, and some of it will be right and some wrong,” Pletcher said. The road-inspired restart has left him with more energy than if he switched to Cytokinetics straight from Gilead.

And while the RV is now parked in Pletcher’s garage, he still expects to use it from time to time. “I’ll let you know six months from now,” he said.

He was only joking, as far he could tell.