About Oak, Elm & Birch

Our firm was founded in 1974 by two Connecticut business lawyers who had decided that Hartford deserved a firm of its own rather than a satellite of someone else's. Fifty years later we are still a Hartford firm — roughly fifty attorneys and staff, six practice groups, and a client book that runs heavily to Connecticut insurance carriers, closely-held manufacturers, family offices, and the nonprofits and institutions that shape civic life in this part of the state. We pride ourselves on being the kind of firm where clients talk to the attorneys actually handling the matter, where associates are trained by partners instead of by a central professional-development department, and where the managing partner still carries a live docket.

How we work with clients

Most engagements at the firm begin with a conversation — often with the same partner the client talked to last time, a year or five years ago, about something else. We try to keep staffing flat. A typical matter at Oak, Elm & Birch runs with one partner carrying the relationship and one or two attorneys doing the drafting and analysis, not a four-tier pyramid. The model is deliberate and it has cost implications on both sides: the partner-to-associate ratio runs flatter than at a larger firm, but the client is also not paying a third-year associate's billable rate to read the operating agreement the partner already knows by heart.

We write our own documents. Most of our agreements were drafted, at some point over the last two decades, by a partner who still practices here. When we update them, a partner reads the redline. When we depart from a form, we do it because the deal actually warrants the departure, not because the template did not anticipate the fact pattern.

Our place in Hartford

The firm has been at 280 Trumbull Street since 1992 and on the 18th floor since 2004. Our attorneys sit on the boards of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Junior League of Hartford, the Mark Twain House, Hartford Youth Scholars, the Bushnell Park Foundation, and a number of other institutions that have shaped the city. We recruit out of UConn School of Law and the Northeast law schools our attorneys attended. We take the Connecticut bar seriously — a meaningful fraction of our partners have held section chairs or executive committee seats at the CBA, and several have argued the cases that the rest of us now cite.

We are not the biggest firm in Hartford and we are not trying to be. We are trying to be the firm our clients keep hiring — the one that answered a question in 1993, came back for an acquisition in 2008, handled the estate planning in 2015, and is still the phone call when something new comes up.

Closing note

Our name sits on the door for a reason. Samuel Oak and Edwin Birch both continue as Of Counsel to the firm. Cornelius Elm — whose seat at the founding table we have never forgotten — passed in 1998, and the firm's governance still reflects the way he thought about building a practice. If you are reading this page because you are considering engaging us, we welcome the conversation. If you are reading it because you are considering joining us, the career paths we offer — summer associates, lateral attorneys, and the staff roles that keep the place running — are described on our Careers page.