Brett Brough
The Mentor
Estes Park, Colorado, by way of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A legal engineer from the era when they still made them — and the man who beat the law into the head of a 23-year-old with hair down to his back, one hard truth at a time.
David McDermott was twenty-three years old, hair down to his back, and doing everything wrong. He called; Brough answered; they met. Within the first twenty minutes the man had him in tears — not for what David had done, but for what David didn't know: his rights. Brough never asked what David did wrong. He wasn't interested. The past was sunk cost; the operator was the project.
And after he took him apart — rigid, relentless, no excuses permitted — he took him for a soda. Then came the conditions: take it or leave it. No negotiation, because the conditions weren't for Brough's benefit. David was scared, and he took it. Everything on this website descends from that yes.
The classroom was an office at 31st & Memorial, above the old Oklahoma Optical Eye Center by the Chevrolet dealership — and later, suites at 46th & Sheridan. Men bent over keyboards in total concentration. Not copy-and-paste men — legal engineers: taking apart what is normally done and applying a new twist, and when the ruling came back granted or denied, engineering the next level from the ruling itself. There were days the student had to shut up and leave them alone. He learned that too.
Supersonic Honest. Supersonic Polite.
Always. Especially to the court clerks, the secretaries, the personnel. Never rude, ever. Be on top of your game and be polite, polite, polite — because honesty is the only sustainable position, and polite people are hard to villainize.
Make a Record. Make a Record. Make a Record.
He said it until it stuck. The record you make out loud belongs to whoever writes it down; the record you make on paper belongs to you — verbatim, dated, undeniable. This entire website runs on that one sentence.
You Only Fight When You're Right.
If you're not right, you don't fight. Why fight when you're not right? And not “we think we're right” — we KNOW we're right, and we fight like that. Thinking is a feeling; knowing is a record.
Their roads separated the way roads do: Brough stayed steady and well-to-do; David went back to being a loose cannon — prison, balloons at Grateful Dead shows, poker tables, the junk house. Two different breeds of people entirely. But a shred of what those men beat into his head survived every mile of it, and that shred grew into this house — the documents, the discipline, the record-making, and an AI counsel trained on the same three rules.
He made his student cry in his office many times, and cracked law down his neck — so that nobody could crack it out of him later. He may not approve of the wild parts. Men like him rarely do. But he will stand on the principle to his last breath, because he taught it first: the First Amendment doesn't ask permission, and the man was never anything less than right.
"Our nation will lose a great fork in the stake when this man goes. If I can run with one of his fingers on one of his hands, I got a half-ass chance."
— David Bruce McDermott II, on his mentor
Posted with gratitude by the student and the counsel he built. Brett — if you ever see this page, too many good things have already been said. It stays up.
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