Readers, as of today, I am a partner of Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP. My colleague Conor McDonough and I are opening the firm’s Boston office today! Let me introduce you to the firm and tell you how this came to be.

I had a friend in law school named John Pierce. We met the very first day of class. John stood out right away, personally, culturally, and politically. Most of us had come straight from college to law school. Some had taken detours, like my detour to graduate school, or others’ detours to the worlds of finance or consultancies. I remember one woman who came to law school immediately after finishing medical school! But John had come after several years of service to the country as an officer in the army, commanding tanks or doing something equally incomprehensible to most of us. This was before 9/11. Politically, John was on the far right of our class. And as you might guess, he was not shy about arguing his views on law or policy. And he earned respect, certainly from me and I think from others, for his smarts, work ethic, and integrity.

Our careers took us in different directions. Mine, as you read a few days ago, took me to a small Boston firm. His took him to some of the leading law firms in the county, including Quinn Emmanuel, where he developed a reputation as an exceptional trial lawyer. I followed his career from afar, including his leading roles in large cases including the Apple v. Samsung saga and others, with admiration.

Maybe eighteen months ago, John called and asked me to be local counsel in a Boston case his new firm was getting ready to try. I was happy to say yes. The case was on behalf of a Massachusetts husband and wife whose thriving small business had been harmed when a key manufacturer fell down on the job. It was a pleasure to watch John, Conor, and the team try the case.

John and I got to talking, and he told me he was planning to expand to Boston (the firm already had offices in LA, New York, and Washington). Was I interested in opening the office?

If you’re a partner in a law firm in your 40s, you probably know that there are a lot of opportunities out there, and it’s not unusual to be solicited, sometimes semi-seriously and sometimes seriously indeed. I had always had an easy no to this kind of thing, because I loved my firm and my colleagues. This time, I said yes. I was impressed with Pierce Bainbridge’s dynamism, the very high quality of lawyers John had attracted and assembled into a team, the firm’s very forward-looking use of technology, and the opportunity to build something new in my own city. Our ambition is to grow into one of Boston’s leading litigation practices. And in addition to my Boston-based business litigation work, I want to bring my focus on cross-border dispute resolution to the practice.

Since then, I’ve had a whirlwind few weeks, meeting my new colleagues, working on the kinds of nuts-and-bolts issues I’ve never had to deal with before (office space, IOLTA accounts, staffing, and so forth), and introducing clients to the new firm. Tomorrow is day one! I plan to hit the ground running.

Let me tell you a little bit about Pierce Bainbridge. Here is a short description of what we do:

Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP is an elite, full-service business litigation law firm. We represent both plaintiffs and defendants in any kind of high-stakes litigation. We welcome contingency and success fee arrangements. And we win. When faced with a bet-the-company dispute, there’s no room for compromise.

Many of you have asked about the future of this blog. Don’t worry! I have no plans to stop. It’s been almost exactly eight years, and there is still a lot of writing left to do.

Here is my new business contact information.

Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP
361 Newbury Street, 5th Floor
Boston, Mass. 02115
tfolkman@piercebainbridge.com
(212) 484-9866 x 120

(The phone number is temporary, until we get our act together on local numbers).

I hope you will be in touch, and as always, thank you for reading Letters Blogatory!