A Firm Foundation for Life after the Bench

For me any discussion of life after the bench necessarily involves the history of a law firm in Portland, Maine, over a period of more than a half century. Straight from law school graduation and two judicial clerkships, (1) I joined Hutchinson, Pierce, Atwood, and Scribner of Portland in August 1952. I arrived as the firm's eighth attorney. Twenty-five years later, in September 1977, I left the firm, which then had grown to twenty-seven lawyers, to serve as Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. After retiring from the Court on February 28, 1992, I returned, of counsel, to the same Portland firm, by then grown to over ninety lawyers in size. Now I have served for fifteen years as counsel to the firm, which, known simply as Pierce Atwood, has grown to some 120 lawyers, including some twenty outside Maine at offices in Portsmouth, Concord, and Boston. In a state as small in population as Maine any interaction between a sitting Chief Justice and his previous law firm, particularly when it is the largest firm in the State and is very active in the courts, demands careful restraint. Being personally conscious of that concern, I took various steps at the outset of my tenure as Chief Justice to avoid any appearance of bias. I consulted with Maine's highly respected Federal Judge Edward T. Gignoux, then a twenty-year veteran of the bench and our only United States district judge. He helped me work out a set of personal rules identifying cases for recusal. For example, in addition to recusal for at least two years in any case involving a party for whom I had worked, I would recuse myself, again for at least two years, from any case in which my old firm was involved, whether or not I had ever had any personal involvement with the case or the client. The same care needed to be exercised, I believed, if I should return to the same firm on leaving the bench. In the months prior to my retirement, I recognized the strong possibility that my old firm might ask me to come back, and I was anxious to avoid any later misunderstanding on the part of the public about my case decisions in the months before I left the Court. Accordingly, before my retirement date I carefully avoided any discussions with the firm about any post-retirement plans and, furthermore, for the last several months on the Court I recused myself in any cases in which Pierce Atwood appeared. By these precautions I sought to avoid any possible inference of bias on my part favoring the firm that might turn up as my post-retirement employer. At the time of any recusal I of course shared my reasons for doing so with my colleagues on the Court. Though some thought me over-cautious, all were fully supportive. Coming back to my old firm after almost fifteen years of self-imposed isolation gave me a special opportunity to observe at first hand the changes that had occurred within the firm as well as in the Maine bar in that period of 1977 to 1992. The two most striking changes were the growth in the size of the bar and of the firm and the greatly increased specialization in both. In that period Pierce Atwood tripled in size, while the Maine bar nearly doubled in size, growing from 1520 to 2993 resident attorneys. In the same period Pierce Atwood became more highly organized into practice groups with well-defined specialties. The individual lawyers became highly skilled in their respective specialties, with commensurate benefits to their clients. But, for someone who in 1952 had started doing everything from title searches and estate planning to family business advice, utility rate cases, and appellate practice, there remained, and indeed remains today, a considerable sentimental attachment to versatility and variety in the practice of law. Another professional trend already started in 1977 but much accelerated by 1992, was the ease of a lawyer's making a lateral move from one firm to another. In 1952 when I was debating whether to come back to Maine and to join the firm that is now Pierce Atwood, the wise senior partner, "Squire" Leonard A. …