Brad Smith

Bradford Lee Smith (born January 17, 1959) is an American attorney and business executive who became Vice Chairman of Microsoft in 2021, and President in 2015. He previously served as a senior vice president and general counsel from 2002 to 2015. Early life and family Smith was born January 17, 1959, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was an engineer and manager at Wisconsin Bell and moved the family around the state several times . Smith graduated from Appleton West High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he was student body president and editor of the school paper; while class president, he brokered one of his first deals, a school hall pass system. Smith met his wife Kathy Surace-Smith while they were undergraduates at Princeton University. Smith studied in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and graduated with a B.A. in 1981 after completing a 199-page long senior thesis titled "The Politics of Refugees: The Development and Promotion of International Refugee Law". Smith and his wife graduated from Princeton together in 1981 and both continued to Columbia Law School. They married in 1983, and spent the school year of 1983-1984 studying international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland, before returning to Columbia to graduate in 1985. Surace-Smith is vice president and general counsel of Seattle biotech company NanoString Technologies. They have a son, born in 1992, and a daughter born in 1995. Career Smith's first job after graduation was as law clerk to United States federal judge Charles Miller Metzner. In 1986, he joined the Washington, D.C. law firm Covington & Burling. He had one condition for the job: to have his own personal computer. He was the first person in the firm with one; it ran Microsoft Word version 1.0. Smith worked for three years in Washington D.C., and four in London, running Covington's software practice there. By 1993 he had become a partner.