Edwin Birch

Edwin Birch co-founded Oak, Elm & Birch in 1974 and has practiced real estate and land-use law from the firm's Hartford office for every one of the intervening years. His work has centered on large-tract acquisitions, conservation easements, and the kind of municipal land-use negotiations that require a lawyer who remembers how the town charter read three revisions ago. He continues as Of Counsel, working primarily with a small group of landowners, land trusts, and long-tenured clients whose matters have spanned decades — and whose original deeds, in several cases, Birch himself reviewed at closings in the late 1970s. Birch graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in agricultural economics in 1965 and earned his J.D. from Boston College Law School in 1968. Before joining Samuel Oak in the firm's founding, he spent six years at a New Haven firm handling farmland and timber-tract matters for clients across eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island — work that established the practice focus he has kept for his entire career. The firm's Real Estate group grew up around him. The first five associates he trained in the 1980s and 1990s went on to become partners at this firm or at peer Hartford practices; three of them remain active in the Connecticut bar. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Birch served on the Connecticut Bar Association's Real Property Section Executive Committee and chaired its Land Use Subcommittee for three separate non-consecutive terms. He was counsel of record on several of the earliest private conservation-easement transactions recorded in the Connecticut land records, working closely with the region's emerging land trust movement and helping to draft template instruments that were later adopted by a number of Connecticut land trusts as their standard forms. In the decades since, he has been directly involved in negotiating the preservation of more than 14,000 acres across the state. His current practice is deliberately narrow. He advises a small circle of families on large-tract succession, counsels two Connecticut land trusts on easement acquisition and defense, and consults with younger attorneys in the Real Estate group on thorny municipal-zoning questions and on the occasional boundary-dispute matter that benefits from his institutional memory of how a particular town's zoning regulations were drafted in the first place. Within the firm he is the informal historian: newer attorneys often stop at his office on the way to a closing to ask about a party name, a prior transaction, or a municipal practice that predates the records the associate has been able to find. Birch takes the 7:40 train from Simsbury most mornings and has kept the same corner office since 1992. The office walls — arranged over thirty years rather than decorated — carry a combination of surveys, hand-annotated topographic maps, and a framed print of the 1834 Beers atlas plate for the town of Hartland. The effect is, as one partner has observed, less that of a law office than of a working forestry archive. Visitors tend to spend the first several minutes of their meeting asking questions about the maps rather than the matter they came to discuss; Birch almost always answers. He continues to take the occasional first-read on new large-tract matters within the Real Estate group, though the day-to-day drafting and closing work is now handled by Wallace Blackwood's team and the group's associates. His role on such matters is increasingly consultative: reading the preliminary title commitment, flagging the municipal-history question that the title search will not surface, and identifying the two or three strategic decisions that will determine how the transaction is structured. Younger attorneys have said that a thirty-minute conversation with Birch on a newly-received matter is worth a week of file review. ## Publications - "The Connecticut Conservation Easement at Forty: Drafting Lessons from the First Generation," *Connecticut Bar Journal*, Vol. 88 (2014). - Contributing author, *Connecticut Land Use Law* (CBA-CLE Publications, 4th ed., 2017) — Chapter 9, Agricultural and Forest Land. - "Drafting the Enforceable Trail Easement," *Connecticut Lawyer* magazine, November 2019. - Regular contributor, Connecticut Land Conservation Council's quarterly bulletin, 2001–present. ## Board Service Birch serves on the board of the Connecticut Land Conservation Council, a role he has held continuously since 1991 and where he currently chairs the Legal Advisory Committee. He is a former trustee of the Farmington River Watershed Association and has served on the advisory board of the Hartford Land Bank since its formation. Earlier in his career he served two terms on the Simsbury Planning Commission and one term on the town's Conservation Commission. ## Beyond the Firm Birch and his wife Margaret have owned the same 40-acre property in Hartland since 1976. He cuts his own firewood, keeps bees in a modest way, and has published occasional short essays on New England stone-wall construction in regional agricultural journals. He and Samuel Oak have shared a standing Friday breakfast at the Chowder Pot in East Windsor for nearly fifty years; the staff there, he has said, keep his coffee order on record in a way that his own office manager does not. He is an honorary member of the New England Forestry Foundation and a sustaining contributor to the Connecticut Historical Society. He was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1968 and remains an active member of the Hartford County Bar Association. Within the firm, he has been — with quiet consistency over five decades — the partner that associates go to when a closing needs an answer that isn't in the file and isn't on any current partner's mental map.