Attorney Profile

Mary Budge has over 15 years of broad-based legal experience,  including 12 years as in-house corporate counsel. As founder and owner of Budge Law Offices, Mary focuses her practice in providing general counsel consulting services and general corporate business advice to small and medium size companies, as well as start-ups.  Ms. Budge has demonstrated exceptional leadership abilities with the capacity to build, train and mentor highly productive operational teams.  She possesses a unique blend of expertise in legal knowledge, growth strategy development, strategic business planning, coordinating operations and establishing / leveraging existing partnerships.  Ms. Budge loves nothing more than to help guide and direct small business owners how to help themselves, and to help them be aware of legal and practical problems before they arise.

Ms. Budge’s representative clients include businesses such as high-tech software companies, retail establishments, consultants, and telecommunications companies, among others. These companies range in size from start-ups with just a few employees to well-established businesses with hundreds of employees.

Prior to forming Budge Law Offices, Mary was a corporate attorney at Secure Computing Corporation, a publicly traded, enterprise security software company. Mary was responsible for all of the company’s legal matters, including commercial transactions, employment matters, mergers and acquisitions, finance matters, and contract negotiation and drafting. Ms. Budge was a member of the leadership team and counseled clients on both legal and business matters. During her tenure at Secure Computing she was a key member of the CEO’s team that developed and executed the strategy to grow the company both organically and through acquisition by increasing revenues from $36M per year in early 2001 to a run rate of over $300M per year in billings by the end of 2007. Prior to joining Secure Computing in 1996, Ms. Budge was an attorney for an intellectual property law firm where she practiced trademark and copyright law.

Ms. Budge brings not only a wealth of experience in representing small businesses, she also is an experienced board member, having served on Secure Computing’s board of directors as its corporate secretary for 12 years, and is a board member of several for-profit and non-profit boards.  Ms. Budge often advises small businesses on corporate governance matters, including how to manage a board of directors and how to maintain corporate records. Ms. Budge is also an adjunct clinical law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in the Business Law Clinic.