Firm History

1974 — Founding

Samuel Oak and Edwin Birch left a larger Hartford firm in the fall of 1973 and spent the following winter meeting — most often at the Chowder Pot in East Windsor, over a standing Friday breakfast that continued for half a century — about what a Connecticut-rooted business law firm might look like if it were designed from the ground up to serve the state's insurance carriers, its industrial manufacturers, and its closely-held family businesses. Cornelius Elm, a Hartford litigator three years their senior who had been counsel to several of the same insurance clients at a different firm, joined the conversation in early 1974 and signed on as the third named partner. The firm opened its doors on Pratt Street in October 1974, with three attorneys, one secretary, and a single engaged client: a Bristol-area valve manufacturer that remains a firm client today, now in its third generation of family ownership.

The early client list was small and concrete. A Hartford insurance brokerage whose principal had grown up next door to Samuel Oak in West Hartford. A family-owned machine shop in Waterbury that made components for Pratt & Whitney and needed corporate and labor counsel from a firm that understood manufacturing. A regional savings bank headquartered in Windsor whose board wanted outside counsel closer to home than the New York firm it had previously used. Those three engagements — an insurance brokerage, a manufacturer, and a bank — set the practice mix that still defines the firm today.

1984–1998 — Building the practice groups

Samuel Oak was elected Managing Partner in 1984 and held the role for almost two decades. During that stretch the firm added its Trusts & Estates group (1986, under the late Margaret Keene), its Labor & Employment practice (1991), and its first dedicated Litigation department (1993). The Real Estate group, which Edwin Birch had led from the beginning, grew from three attorneys in 1985 to nine by 1995 and took on much of the commercial-development work that accompanied downtown Hartford's early-1990s rebuild.

Cornelius Elm died unexpectedly in September 1998 at the age of 64, in the middle of a trial term on a reinsurance matter that was later settled under the supervision of the court. He had chaired the firm's Executive Committee since 1992 and had been the partner most responsible for Oak, Elm & Birch's emergence as a credible Connecticut litigation shop. The partnership voted to leave his named seat on the Executive Committee empty for the remainder of the fiscal year and then, at the 1999 annual meeting, for two additional years as a quiet tribute. The seat was filled again in 2001. His portrait hangs in the firm's main conference room.

1992, 2004 — Trumbull Street

The firm outgrew its Pratt Street space in the late 1980s and, after a year of sublets on Lewis Street, moved to 280 Trumbull Street in 1992. The building was newer, the floor plate was larger, and the firm's growth through the balance of the decade argued that the move had come not a month too early. In 2004 the firm consolidated its attorneys and staff onto the 18th floor of the same building, where it remains today. The 18th-floor buildout was designed with a single large main conference room — now the Elm Room — and a series of smaller rooms intended to make the practice groups legible to the client's eye when they arrived for a meeting.

2011–2018 — New groups, new leadership

The Tax group was formalized as a standalone practice in 2011, under the leadership of Flannery O'Neill, who had joined the firm as an associate in 2006 following her LL.M. in Taxation at NYU. The Tax practice had existed in various informal forms since the 1980s, always tightly integrated with Corporate, but the 2011 reorganization gave it a budget, a designated group head, and the freedom to take on direct Tax engagements rather than only supporting other groups' transactions.

Samuel Oak stepped back from day-to-day firm management in 2003 and Ariana Whitlock served as Managing Partner from 2003 to 2018. Whitlock retired from the role — though not from the practice — at the end of the 2017–2018 fiscal year. The partnership elected Steven Stone, then chair of the Corporate group, as her successor in May 2018. Stone, who had joined the firm in 2010 after seven years as in-house counsel at a Hartford-based industrial holding company, brought an operational sensibility to the role that the firm's committee minutes from his first year reflect in detail. Lance Harrington, the Litigation chair, was elected Deputy Managing Partner at the same meeting.

2024 and onward

The firm marked its 50th anniversary at the Wadsworth Atheneum in October 2024. A brief institutional history is in preparation for publication in 2025, and an oral-history project with retired partners, paralegals, and legal secretaries whose tenure reaches back to the 1970s is underway. What the firm looks like in 2074 will be shaped by work the current partners and associates are already doing. The Connecticut orientation is not going to change. The size of the partnership is not going to change by much. The client list will keep the shape it has had for fifty years — Hartford insurance, Connecticut manufacturing, closely-held families, and the institutions that hold the city together.