Remembering Barclay Kamb, longtime Cooley lawyer
A key member of Cooley’s life sciences team, Kamb had deep expertise in transactions
Barclay Kamb, a 30-year veteran of Cooley who was instrumental in building the firm’s life sciences practice, passed away on May 31 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 65.
Kamb was born in Southern California into a family of esteemed scientists — his grandfather chemist Linus Pauling was the only person to win two unshared Nobel prizes; his father, Walter Barclay Kamb, a prominent geophysicist.
It felt like the path he was supposed to take. He graduated with a B.S. in Biology from Stanford University in 1979 and went on to study cellular genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But an incident involving his bicycle and an off-duty police officer changed that, sparking an interest in law that would lead him to Berkeley Law, where he received his J.D. in 1988 and won the Prosser Prize in Contracts.
Kamb began his career as a litigator at Wilson Sonsini and then Heller Ehrman but quickly found himself intrigued by the life sciences work his wife, Barbara Kosacz, was doing at Cooley.
Kamb joined Cooley’s Palo Alto, Calif., office in May 1993, becoming the first at the firm with a graduate education in the life sciences and a mentee of revered biopharma lawyer Alan Mendelson. His clients included biotech, medtech, digital health and other life sciences companies, which he advised in a wide range of corporate and financial affairs and offered deep expertise in transactions involving IP.
Kamb was intensely curious about his clients' technologies.
“He both loved new technologies and was an incredibly quick study about them,” Kosacz said. “He really wanted to understand it. He would practically take your deposition to understand it, because I think his view was, ‘look, if I’m going to advise you on this, do a transaction for you, I need to know what it’s really about.’”
Longtime Cooley colleague Laura Berezin described him as a cerebral lawyer of “high principles,” one who believed in a “really principled approach to everything he did,” including his law practice.
“He was never happy with just an answer like, well, that’s the way it’s always done, or, that’s market standard,” she said. “He always wanted to know why, and he wanted to argue the finer points of the merits of everything.”
Those characteristics helped him to navigate and develop deep expertise in the bespoke, IP-heavy and highly technical commercial, licensing and partnering agreements that are particular to life sciences companies, a specialized domain in which he was one of the earliest practitioners, according to Berezin.
“You had to have a really deep understanding of not just intellectual property, but of life sciences’ core business matters. Being able to define a milestone that would trigger a payment by a pharmaceutical company around clinical trial results. You really had to understand the disease indication and how clinical trials work and a lot of very, very technical life science concepts,” Berezin said.
Kamb helped build this part of Cooley’s practice from the ground up.
Gregarious and outgoing with an irrepressible smile, Kamb relished attending biopharma industry conferences and became close friends with many in the business, including his clients.
“His clients loved him,” Berezin said.
Kamb’s passions extended well beyond the law firm, and he indulged his pursuits with the same attention to detail that he did in his professional life.
“Whatever he set his mind to, he was really good at,” Kosacz said. “He was one of the most competent humans I’ve ever known in terms of his ability to do many, many things, not just superficially, but very, very well.”
A musician who played the cello as a child, he loved to play the guitar and write songs. “It was a real source of joy for him,” Kosacz said.
As a teen, Kamb drained his bank account to buy “massive JBL speakers” that were “the talk of the high school classmates and the basis for some exceptional parties,” twin brother and A2 Biotherapeutics Inc. founder and CSO Alexander “Sasha” Kamb said.
His knack for music was well-known in industry, too.
“A few months ago, Barclay, Karen [Bernstein] and I just talked about music. We all agreed Barclay should join us here in Nashville and we’d get him into a jam session. Sadly, that never came to pass. Barclay was a gifted musician, a good friend, and a man who knew how to work hard but also have fun. He will be missed,” said BioCentury co-founder, President and CEO David Flores.
He also loved nature and the outdoors.
In his youth, wilderness adventures with his family took him to Blue Glacier, Mt. Olympus and Thousand Island Lake among many other destinations in the West. They would foster a lifelong love of hiking and backpacking and give way to annual trips to Stanford Sierra Camp at Fallen Leaf Lake with friends and family.
Wine was another passion. And beyond being a connoisseur, he grew grapes and made wine in the Santa Cruz mountains, another family heirloom.
He was also a devoted father of three daughters. In addition to Kosacz, Kamb is survived by Addison, Margaret and Ramona.