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targeting the notables and quotables of
kansas city
It’s hard to tell if it comes from practicing a profession that advises
clients to say only what’s necessary or if it comes from his Iowa
stoicism, but Brian Gardner is a man who measures his words. As the managing
partner of Morrison & Hecker, Gardner’s words are his trade,
and he has prepared for that trade almost his whole life. He knew from
an early age that he wanted to be a lawyer, he says, “Because there’s
nothing I enjoy more than a good argument.”
Through his childhood in Cambridge, Iowa, Gardner saw his father serve
as mayor and imagined that he, too, would become involved in Iowa politics
some day. His 1974 bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University prepared
him in speech, political science and history. His job baling hay on the
agricultural school’s farm reinforced his work ethic. Both would
serve him well when he went off to the University of Iowa to study law.
Once there, a friend of his suggested he interview with visiting law firms,
for the experience if nothing else. Because he was going just for the
experience, Gardner signed up to interview with only one firm—Morrison
& Hecker of Kansas City. Before he knew it, he was accepting positions
with the firm first as a clerk then as an associate. There was a brief
return to Iowa, but Gardner has worked for Morrison continuously since
1981, and in 1990, at the age of 37, he became managing partner.
Now 12 years later, Gardner finds himself co-engineering the merger of
two large law firms to create one giant one. In his negotiations with
Stinson, Mag & Fizzell, he has exercised the same degree of thought
that informs his words. Despite his future as a co-managing partner of
the second-largest firm in Kansas City, however, Gardner stays close to
his roots through his farm on the Missouri-Iowa border. Asked how often
he spends time on the farm, he laughs and answers in his understated way,
“Not often enough.”