6 files on the desk from Brookfield, Wisconsin. 6 carry a net-worth figure.
Managing Director, litigation finance (patent underwriting) · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Christopher (Chris) Freeman, Managing Director in Burford Capital's Chicago patent group; former Blackbird Technologies co-founder/VP Head of Litigation; ex-Kirkland & Ellis IP partner. Not Prentice L. Freeman Jr. (P.L. Freeman Co., Brookfield HVAC).
$3 million+
Christopher Freeman underwrites patent and intellectual-property legal risk as a managing director in Burford Capital's Chicago office. Chambers ranks him in U.S. litigation funding for IP, and IAM has listed him among the world's leading IP strategists for several consecutive years.
Before Burford he co-founded Blackbird Technologies and ran its litigation function, after an IP partnership at Kirkland & Ellis and associate roles at Quinn Emanuel and Latham & Watkins. He holds a Northwestern engineering degree and a Boston University J.D. Public bios also note pre-law work at Epic Systems in Wisconsin.
Brookfield is the Wisconsin city on his page. The documented Wisconsin chapter is Epic Systems before law school, with Chicago as his recent Burford base.
Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Brookfield East class of 1999; spherical-nucleic-acid chemist; Exicure co-founder/CEO; CEO of EVOQ Therapeutics since 2023
$2 million
David A. Giljohann turned a Brookfield science-club childhood into spherical nucleic acids—DNA and RNA wrapped around a gold core, built to enter a cell and shut off a bad gene—and a Chicago-area biotech career. Brookfield’s science name is not a visiting professor who retired to a cul-de-sac; he swam, ran Science Club, and left East for Northwestern.
He attended Tonawanda Elementary and Pilgrim Park before Brookfield East, class of 1999. At Northwestern he earned a biology degree, a Spanish minor, and a chemistry Ph.D. in Chad Mirkin’s lab in 2009. He licensed the spherical-nucleic-acid work with his advisor, founded AuraSense in 2009, then Exicure in 2011, and ran Exicure as CEO from 2013 while the constructs moved toward clinical trials. Crain’s Chicago put him on its 40 Under 40 list in 2019; Endpoints had already listed him among biopharma executives under 40. Exicure’s later public-company years were rough.
In January 2023 he became CEO of EVOQ Therapeutics in Ann Arbor, an autoimmunity company. His family still lives in Elm Grove, next door to the district that let a science kid stay late. The Elmbrook schools that taught him—teachers including Sue Miller, Marina Kane, Dick Wood, Kathy Drucke, and Mike Rose—remain the place tie; the lab towns are where the papers and the companies live.
Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Brookfield native
$480 million
Jenny Just is the Brookfield-raised fintech founder who co-built PEAK6 and Apex Fintech Solutions, the brokerage plumbing behind firms such as SoFi, Ally, and Webull. A Brookfield Central High School graduate in the class of 1986, she grew up with two working parents and four brothers—experience she later credited for making a trading floor feel like home—and a crew of girlfriends she still calls the Gidgets, thirteen friends who started before grade school and still reunite as Packers fans.
After Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1990 she headed to Chicago because it was the big city, taking a job at O'Connor & Associates because there was beer in the fridge. They sat her on a step at the Board of Trade the day Drexel filed for bankruptcy; there was no women's restroom. She stayed. By her mid-twenties she and Matt Hulsizer had built an over-the-counter equity-derivatives desk. When a merger wanted them in Connecticut, they stayed in Chicago, put up about $1.5 million, and in 1997 founded PEAK6—she was twenty-nine and a single mother. They later married.
Apex became the clearing and brokerage infrastructure under major retail trading apps. The fortune is Chicago finance; the origin is a Brookfield Lancer childhood, not a imported executive myth.
Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Brookfield Central star; Wisconsin Badgers and Cleveland Browns left tackle; Pro Football Hall of Fame; Harrison-Thomas Stadium namesake
$123 million
Joseph Hayden “Joe” Thomas is the Brookfield kid who became one of the NFL’s most durable offensive tackles and a Pro Football Hall of Famer. Born in Brookfield on December 4, 1984, he grew up in the Elmbrook schools—Hillside Elementary, Wisconsin Hills Middle, and Brookfield Central, class of 2003—where classmates and coaches already called the oversized lineman Big Foot. His mother, Sally, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that opposing grade-school soccer coaches once shouted to get her son off the field because he looked too big to belong. He did belong: honor roll all four years, football, basketball, and track, and co-Defensive Player of the Year for the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association in 2002 while also playing tackle, tight end, fullback, kicker, and punter.
As a senior he won Division 1 state titles in the shot put (62 feet 1½ inches) and the discus (185-6), and he closed four years of Lancer basketball with twenty points in a state-quarterfinal loss to Fond du Lac. At Wisconsin he became an All-American left tackle. On draft weekend in 2007 he skipped New York and went fishing with his father, Eric, a banker who had not missed a day of work in thirty-nine years; the Cleveland Browns called the boat and made him their first-round pick. He played his entire NFL career in Cleveland, starting every game and setting a franchise ironman mark of 10,363 consecutive snaps before retirement and induction into the Hall of Fame in Canton.
Brookfield still claims the hometown chapter. In 2020 Brookfield Central named its stadium Harrison-Thomas Stadium for Thomas and 1996 Olympic champion Kenny Harrison. He has credited coaches Bruce Follo, Scott Nelson, Mark Pulkownik, and Mark Adams by name. He lives in Madison now; the field named for him remains in Brookfield.
Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Born Dearborn, Michigan, March 9, 1954; raised in Brookfield; Brookfield East class of 1972
$125
Halloween was the doorway. A shy Brookfield kid used a monster-makeup handbook as a bible, then took any local production that would have him—Brookfield East, Waukesha Civic Theatre, whoever else was putting on a show. Martin Patrick Robinson was born in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 9, 1954, raised in Brookfield, and graduated from Brookfield East in 1972 before leaving for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His father was a hydraulics engineer and his mother a teacher; a marionette souvenir from Mexico, when he was five, was mostly for messing with the family cat.
A touring Jack and the Beanstalk company hired him at $125 a week; two years under Bil Baird followed. In 1980 he mailed a picture and a resume to Sesame Street. A year later, at the Ansonia Hotel, about 300 people shrank to five. The only opening was Mr. Snuffleupagus: six feet tall, a strong back, a voice to match Jerry Nelson. He tried the costume on the seventh or eighth attempt. They never phoned. A season schedule showed up in the mail. He has been Snuffy since 1981 and Telly since 1984; Telly is the favorite. New performers usually start as a right-hand helper on characters with working mouths; Robinson got the classic character first and learned the helper work afterward—he called it backwards.
In 1982 he designed, built, and performed Audrey II in the original Off-Broadway Little Shop of Horrors, and again on Broadway in 2003. He married Sesame writer Annie Evans on the 123 Sesame Street stoop at Kaufman Astoria in 2008; twin daughters arrived in 2009. The shy kid from East is still doing the big woolly character. Brookfield’s claim is the upbringing and the East diploma, not the Dearborn birth certificate.
Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Youngest woman elected to the Wisconsin Legislature; first woman to head the U.S. Small Business Administration; born and schooled in Brookfield
$82,500
Susan Jane Shannon Engeleiter was the youngest woman ever elected to the Wisconsin Legislature and later the first woman to run the U.S. Small Business Administration. She grew up in Brookfield—Brookfield Elementary, Pilgrim Park, Brookfield Central class of 1970—and has often described a small-business household as the ground that shaped her politics.
The clerk at the Wisconsin State Senate would not hire her at first: there were no page uniforms cut for women. She kept showing up until he relented, and she and a friend became the first female pages in the building. Through UW–Madison (class of 1974) she worked twenty to thirty hours a week, then spent a summer knocking on some twelve thousand Waukesha County doors. At twenty-two she won an eight-way primary and beat a nineteen-year-old in the general by joking that she had more experience. She left the Assembly to chase Bob Kasten’s House seat and lost the 1978 primary to Jim Sensenbrenner by 589 votes. A 1980 special election put her in the state Senate, where she became the first woman minority leader; she finished a UW law degree in 1981 while sitting in the chamber. In 1988 she ran for the U.S. Senate and lost to Herb Kohl.
George H. W. Bush named her SBA administrator in 1989—the first woman in the job. When she was sworn in she had a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son and had backed six weeks of maternity leave for Wisconsin workers. Honeywell later took her to Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has been with Data Recognition Corporation, an educational-testing firm, serving as CEO since 2006. The page who did not fit the uniform ended up running the agency that writes the rules for people who start without a uniform.