Health Care / Medicine, In-House Counsel

In-House Q&A: Bryan Huffman Of Prime Therapeutics

The pharmacy benefits company's Senior Legal Counsel discusses how his efforts in public service ultimately allowed him to meet a career goal with an in-house position.

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Bryan D. Huffman is Senior Legal Counsel at Prime Therapeutics. Headquartered in Eagan, Minnesota, the company manages pharmacy benefits for nearly 33 million members through its relationships with health plans, employers, and government programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Hear about how Bryan’s efforts in public service honed his legal skills, and ultimately allowed him to meet a career goal with an in-house position.

(This interview had been edited for length and clarity.)

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Why don’t we start with sort of your career path that brought you to Prime Therapeutics.

During law school I worked for the City of Minneapolis. I was also working toward getting my master’s in public policy. That background and experience helped me get a job at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, and not only did it help me get the job, it allowed me to really hit the ground running when I got there. I was in healthcare licensing, we represented agencies responsible for regulating pharmacies, nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professions. We provided a wide range of advice. Sometimes we’d get calls saying, “The FDA is staging a raid, what do I do, what can I say?” I really enjoyed that job. Before I went to law school, I thought really seriously about going to pharmacy school, it was cool to deal with the pharmacy licensing board and get back to that interest a little bit.

I bet. Sounds like you were well-qualified, although it was hard for any new attorney to get a job at that point.

We graduated at a really terrible time for the legal job market.

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We sure did. What did you do after you left the AG’s office?

I left that position, and went over to Saint Paul Public Schools in an in-house counsel role for the school district. I knew that ultimately, I wanted to be in-house, and this role provided me with some great experience. It was a really small office at the St. Paul school district, when I started there it was just my boss and me and one paralegal.

After about a year we added one more lawyer. That is a huge organization though, that had a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar budget at the time.

By necessity, we really were generalists in the purest sense of the word. We dealt with issues like contracts, intellectual property, real estate, family law, you might have an employee being harassed by a parent. Everything there came back to education, but there is lots of infrastructure you don’t really think about when it comes to the legal needs of a school district.

That position really helped me be agile. There’s no way you’re going to be an expert on everything, but that job really helped me learn what questions to ask, how to reach a solution that furthered the organization’s interests, and to develop an answer the best way I can even in an area of law I’m not initially familiar with.

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How did you get from being in-house at a school district to Prime?

I really enjoyed working for the St. Paul school district but was looking to get back into healthcare. I had some networking connections at Prime and found an opportunity to join the company as a legal counsel. 

Initially, my role solely focused on litigation management, third-party subpoenas, and government inquiries. My responsibilities have grown over the past four years to include supporting our licensing team, government affairs, and leading our eDiscovery team.  

Are you finding Prime Therapeutics to your liking as compared to being at a firm or your other past work experiences?

I’m really enjoying Prime, I’ve been there for around four years now. We have a really great team of nine attorneys, and the general counsel has really taken the opportunity to mold the team. The organization as a whole is great.

Prime is a great place to work, it’s a great organization. Culture is huge, and Prime has a really strong culture. You feel very supported from a professional development standpoint.

One example: Prime has supported my goal of obtaining my MBA, which will be complete this summer. Some places are worried that might make you leave, or make you want to leave for a promotion from your current role.

Here, though, I’ve talked to the general counsel about my long-term career goals, and everyone has been so supportive and encouraging. It’s a big organization, there are around 3,500 employees. But you still feel really supported and part of a team.

How has the pandemic changed your work?

I was actually back in Tennessee visiting family for a wedding in March of last year, and I got an email saying, “Nobody come back to the office, we’re going remote.” It’s basically been like that ever since. I haven’t worked from a physical office since March 9, 2020.  

Even after the pandemic?

When things return to normal we will be moving toward a hub and home model.  Minnesota employees will “hub” out of our headquarters in Eagan, Minnesota, but moving forward we’re looking to be working from home about 75 to 90 percent of the time.

There have been adjustments in how to do things most efficiently. It hasn’t been atypical to have 10-15 people on an email chain, or to explain things without a face-to-face. But we’re all getting used to working remotely, and it’s been so effective in other ways that it’s going to be around for the foreseeable future.

Do you have a favorite, and a least favorite, thing about working in an in-house role?

My favorite thing is it’s about being a good business partner. Litigation management is a little less adversarial than being the litigator. I like helping to establish strategy, working to liaise, to establish those business relationships, and protect/further the company’s interests from a business standpoint. I like helping the business.

I don’t know if I have a least favorite thing. There’s nothing I really don’t like about in-house work. I really like the collaborative aspects of it. For the most part, you don’t get into the nitty gritty aspects of practice, the research, the writing, you’re not having to come up with your particular legal theory. It’s really about advising the business. For me that’s great work. With that said, I do enjoy the opportunity to develop creative litigation strategies and work with outside counsel to execute them. 

Do they listen to your advice?

Sometimes in-house legal counsel can be viewed as the “no” people. So you have to work on really developing relationships and establishing equity as a business partner. You can’t just always say, “Well, you can’t do this or we’ll get sued.” Approach it as how to get to goals rather than just being a barrier, and yeah, they’ll listen.

Well, seems like a sound approach. Thank you for taking the time to chat today, I really appreciate it.

No problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s been 10 years since we graduated, it’s been good to catch up.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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