Published in 2024 Southwest Super Lawyers magazine
By Nancy Henderson on April 3, 2024
In 1980, Deborah Peacock was standing at the bottom of the hill, overseeing operations at a Salt Lake City mining mill where copper was ground for industrial use, when the crushing machine operator called her in a panic from the top of the slope. “I have to get out of here!” he yelled. “I can’t take it.”
Racing up the hill, Peacock, a metallurgical engineer and the frontline foreman at Kennecott Minerals Company, saw what she describes as “a blanket of tarantulas coming over the mountain.”
Of her terrified colleague, she says, “I talked him into staying if I stayed with him. And eventually the tarantulas fell into the crusher with the rocks. I’ve never heard of or seen such a thing like that since, nor has anybody else at the mine. But apparently they do migrate like that, in hordes. … It was a creepy experience, but it was just really fascinating. It was a beautiful thing.”
Whether it’s a cascade of arachnids or a tricky patent, the 67-year-old Peacock often finds herself in situations where quick decisions have to be made. But, she says, “Everything always works out. I’m an optimist; very happy. So to me, it’s hardly even classified as a risk. I just know I can get things to work out, whatever I set my mind to.”
She has, in fact, conquered plenty of obstacles, cheerfully chiseling away at barrier after barrier in the traditionally male world of engineering, all while keeping her composure, self-respect and sense of humor. Nearly 30 years after she founded the Albuquerque-based Peacock Law on a shoestring, it is now the largest intellectual property firm in the state and much of the Southwest, with a staff of 30 serving a worldwide clientele, and offices in New Mexico, New York and Southern Colorado.
Peacock uses her 5’2” stature to her advantage. “If you can get people to like you and to connect with you, then you have a better chance of doing the deal,” she says. “First of all, they’re not going to be intimidated by me. But over time they realize I’m going to be really tough. In fact, a lawyer from a pharmaceutical company told me, many years later, ‘You’re the toughest negotiator I’ve ever met.’”
Eight years ago, Rob Bennett, founder and CEO of clean tech firm Block Energy, recruited Peacock to serve on the board of directors for New Mexico Gas and then the board of his own company, and later hired her to manage all the legal services for Block Energy, including the company’s IP portfolio and contracts. “Everyone who meets Deborah comes away with the same comment: ‘That lady is smart,’” Bennett says. “She brings a warm intensity to negotiations which is extremely effective.”
He adds, “She has all the leadership skills of the best CEOs I have worked with. … I am lucky that Deborah is a part of my business and part of my life. She genuinely wants me to succeed, and when you feel that kind of caring in business or in any part of life, it’s transformational. It certainly has been for me.”
In a chapter she wrote for a 2016 motivational book, We Got Mojo!, Peacock refers to her Denver childhood as “idyllic.” The youngest girl of five, she was both nerd and tomboy, playing softball, climbing trees and hanging out with her friends, mostly guys. Spellbound by Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, she says, “I loved anything to do with outer space and looking at the stars.” An avid rock collector, she also felt an affinity for old western mines.
With her gender, however, came roadblocks. Junior high girls in the ‘60s were expected to take classes in sewing and cooking. Not one to blindly follow the rules, young Peacock marched into the principal’s office and convinced him to let her sign up for wood shop, becoming the only girl in the class. Later, the principal told her dad, who was also a principal, “I just hated to see your daughter coming.”
She’d never even heard the term “metallurgical engineering” until she enrolled in the Colorado School of Mines—on a full scholarship—defying her high school counselor and others who told her she’d never be accepted. It was tough to find a summer internship for a female student, but an Australian professor nabbed her a spot with a forward-thinking superintendent at an underground tin mine in the rainforest of Zeehan, Tasmania.
Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, the superintendent was gone. After taking one look at her, his replacement quipped, “What are you doing here?” and, for the next week, refused to allow her into the mine. But, demonstrating her knack for befriending enemies, she kept asking him to dance at the company’s welcome party until he relented. That broke both the ice and his bias against the mine’s only female worker.
“If you can get people to like you and connect with you, then you have a better chance of doing the deal.”
Peacock’s powers of persuasion were put to good use again when, after graduating in 1978, she was hired as foreman at Kennecott’s Utah Copper Division (now Rio Tinto). She was the first woman to hold the position since World War II, when women ran the place while the men fought overseas. She developed a genuine interest in her crew members’ lives and earned their respect by doing the same tasks they did: driving bulldozers, welding broken equipment, and shoveling ore onto the conveyor belt. Even so, she often found herself the brunt of their jokes—finding tarantulas stashed in her lunchbox, her locker, her shoes. Rather than get angry, she laughed off their pranks—and got the last laugh by scoring higher production numbers than anyone else.
“What I learned from this job is that men love to tease, and they like to tease everybody, not just the women,” she says. “I learned a lot about how to motivate people, especially men, and how to work with men.”
Taking her boss’s advice to earn another degree if she wanted to advance at Kennecott, Peacock had already been accepted at Harvard Law School in 1982 when the decline of the mining industry triggered massive layoffs. Her employer helped her land a job with an IP lawyer in Boston, where she worked while studying for her J.D. “I really liked it because it wasn’t just limited to one technical area,” she says. “I got to learn all sorts of science and engineering areas.”
She quickly discerned one of the main differences between engineering and law. “In engineering, there’s a black-and-white answer. There’s a number you get to,” she says. “In law, there is no answer. There are two sides to every story.”
Her biggest law school adjustment was no longer finding herself at the top of her class. “I was just average at Harvard. It was humiliating,” she says, before adding, with a laugh, “It was a good, humbling experience that I needed in my life.”
Upon earning her J.D. in 1985, she was offered a full-time job at the Boston firm, but she turned it down. “I was a Western girl,” she says. She also turned down the chance to climb the management ladder at Kennecott. Instead, at Rodey, Dickason, Sloan, Akin & Robb in Albuquerque, she worked “day and night” to grow its patent practice area from scratch, handling matters for small companies and individual inventors.
In her first year, she helped New Mexico Tech, inventor of the nicotine patch, draft and negotiate a licensing agreement with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Countering Big Pharma’s low offer, she dug in her heels and secured millions for her client, paving the way for the university to set up a foundation to fund scholarships. Says Peacock, “That’s when I realized I really like doing the deals.”
A decade later, a series of mergers and departures at two other Albuquerque firms led her to strike out on her own. Going solo wasn’t easy; to pay for it all, she took out a second mortgage on her house, used credit cards to make ends meet, and secured a loan, thanks to another local attorney who put in a good word for her at the bank. “And right as I was maxing out that line of credit,” she says, “that’s when the money started coming in from clients.”
“Everyone who meets Deborah comes away with the same comment: That lady is smart.’” – Rob Bennett, a client of Peacock’s
She currently travels the world as her firm’s rainmaker. “I love that part of it,” she says. “I love meeting with the clients and discussing strategy and getting them involved.” Spending so much time away from home means she had to sacrifice one of her favorite pastimes, performing in the Albuquerque Concert Band, but she still plays piano for her own pleasure.
Over the years she has so deeply honed her negotiating skills that a Department of Energy lawyer once told her, “You’re like a Venus flytrap. You draw them in, and then you kill them in the deal.” Her “secret sauce,” she says, is understanding “what’s driving everybody and what their concerns are. Once you understand that, then you can make the deal to satisfy everyone.”
Although Peacock is still involved in litigation when necessary, she prefers to stay out of the courtroom. “I’m a transactional lawyer, primarily, and it’s really hard to be transactional in litigation,” she says. “In litigation, the judges control your life and your deadlines. I travel more than half the time, and litigation would not be a good fit for me. It never has been.”
Her engineering background boosts her practice in multiple ways, especially given her status as both a registered patent attorney and a registered professional engineer. The first requires an engineering or science background; the second, a stringent test that weeds out all but 8% of engineering professionals. “Having an engineering degree, in general, helps you understand all sorts of technologies and how to solve problems,” Peacock says. “When I help with the patents, I just know things about metallurgy and mineral processing that need to be in there. When I’m helping with contracts, I know how mining companies work.”
Rose Stella, general counsel at Jetti Resources, which extracts primarily copper for energy use, relies on Peacock’s advice on patent and trade secret matters, portfolio maintenance and commercial agreements. Just as important as Peacock’s background, Stella says, is her willingness to truly get to know the team. “Deborah is very responsive, incredibly practical and enthusiastic about helping us achieve our goals. She is passionate about representing entrepreneurial companies that are developing and commercializing disruptive technologies.”
Peacock is also relentless when it comes to helping them get what they deserve. Once, a client hurriedly called her in to review the IP clauses in a deal involving a life sciences device it was about to license to a major company. After taking a look at the acquisition documents, Peacock told her client, “I don’t think you’re getting enough for this. What if the company makes it big?”
The other side’s legal team bristled, but Peacock wouldn’t stop until she negotiated new royalties and residuals. “That company made four times more on the residuals than they ever made off the original acquisition price,” she recalls. “My input, at the last minute, made all of the original founders multimillionaires.”
Peacock now has her sights set on the skies and beyond. Years ago, when she counseled a client who wanted to mine on the moon, she recalls, “Everybody thought I was nuts. I even gave a national seminar at the Society of Mining Engineering about mining on the moon and asteroids.”
That idea is coming closer to reality every day. Peacock now mentors a number of startup companies across the globe focused on mining outer space for water and ice, minerals and space debris. In 2023, she was invited to Buckingham Palace as one of 100 global space leaders to unveil the seal of the Astra Carta, a commitment to involving the private sector in the “next frontier of sustainability” launched by the Sustainable Markets Initiative and embraced by England’s King Charles III.
Such projects have only fueled her lifelong love of rocket ships, science fiction and space exploration. In her office hang photos of astronauts. Shelves hold interesting rocks collected on her many travels. A “dilithium crystal” from the set of the original Star Trek show—she bought it at a Christie’s auction in New York—claims its rightful spot on the top shelf.
So when the time comes, will she travel to space? Says Peacock, “I would love to if there’s a comfy luxury space hotel.”
Search attorney feature articles
Featured lawyers
Helpful links
Other featured articles
How former soccer star Haley Morrison feeds her competitive instincts
Since appearing in the 2011 Super Lawyers magazine article, Shargel has moved from small law to big
General Johanna Clyborne is in charge: of her career, her cases, and her confidence
Find top lawyers with confidence
The Super Lawyers patented selection process is peer influenced and research driven, selecting the top 5% of attorneys to the Super Lawyers lists each year. We know lawyers and make it easy to connect with them.
Find a lawyer near you