Steven Stone

Steven Stone has served as Managing Partner of Oak, Elm & Birch since 2018 and leads the firm's Corporate and M&A practice. His transactional work concentrates on the sectors that define Connecticut's economy: insurance carriers and their holding companies, energy and utility-adjacent businesses, and advanced-materials and aerospace suppliers in the Hartford–Bristol–Waterbury corridor. He structures and closes middle-market acquisitions, joint ventures, and minority investments. He regularly counsels client boards through the kinds of regulatory overlays — Connecticut Insurance Holding Company Act filings, PURA review, DOJ Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance — that slow deals down when they are handled late rather than early. Stone earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2001 and his B.A. in Economics from Trinity College in 1998. Before joining Oak, Elm & Birch in 2010, he spent seven years as in-house counsel to a Hartford-based industrial holding company, where he worked on bolt-on acquisitions, divestitures, and financing transactions across the company's insurance-services and specialty-materials subsidiaries. That in-house stretch shapes how he runs matters today. Tight scope. Early identification of the three things that actually move the deal. A visible cost curve the client can track without asking for it. As Managing Partner, Stone has led the firm's internal strategy since 2018, with a focus on succession planning within practice groups, lateral recruitment into the Corporate and Tax practices, and the firm's 2022 expansion of its New York bar coverage to support cross-border deal flow. He chairs the Executive Committee and works closely with Deputy MP Lance Harrington on firm operations, personnel, and compensation. Within the Corporate group he continues to carry an active docket and is first-chair on the practice's largest matters. He is admitted in Connecticut and New York and is a member of the Connecticut Bar Association's Business Law Section, the Hartford County Bar Association, and the New York State Bar's Corporate Law Committee. He has been listed in *Chambers USA* for Corporate/M&A (Connecticut) since 2019 and in *Best Lawyers in America* for Corporate Law and Mergers & Acquisitions Law since 2017. ## Representative Matters - Lead counsel to a Hartford-based specialty-insurance carrier in its $180M acquisition of a Rhode Island program administrator, including Connecticut Insurance Department Form A approval and post-closing integration, closed November 2023. - Represented Farmington Technology Group in a cross-border minority investment by a German industrial strategic, including structuring of a shareholder agreement with tag-along and ROFR provisions, 2022. - Counsel to the independent directors of a Connecticut mutual insurance holding company in connection with a proposed reorganization under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 38a-156, 2020–2021. - Represented Constitution Financial Holdings in a $94M recapitalization and minority investment from a family-office consortium, including negotiation of an investor-rights agreement and board-composition charter, closed March 2024. - Counsel to a Waterbury-area aerospace supplier in a strategic sale to a publicly-traded acquirer, including Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance and post-closing transition services negotiation, 2021. ## Speaking & CLE - Panelist, "M&A in the Regulated Industries: What Insurance, Energy, and Healthcare Deals Have in Common," CBA Business Law Section Annual Meeting, 2023. - Co-presenter, "Connecticut Insurance Holding Company Act Filings — A Practitioner's Walkthrough," CT Bar Association CLE, October 2021. - Faculty, "The Managing Partner Role in Mid-Sized Firms," New England Law Firm Management Association, 2022. - Panelist, "Middle-Market Deal Terms: Earn-Outs, Indemnity, and the Gap Between Model and Market," CBA Business Law Section, Hartford, 2024. Stone's approach to running the Managing Partner role has, by his own account, drawn heavily on what he learned sitting across from a CEO in his in-house years: that the lawyer's job, when done well, is to compress options rather than expand them. Within the firm he has been a consistent advocate for flat, readable case and deal memoranda over discursive ones, and he has said in Compensation Committee settings that the firm will not reward over-lawyered work product on either the transactional or litigation side. The Managing Partner role, as he has structured it, is roughly one-third client work and two-thirds firm management — a ratio he has said he prefers over one that would force him to choose. Within the broader Hartford legal community, Stone serves on the Executive Committee of the Hartford County Bar Association and is a past president of the Columbia Law School Connecticut Alumni Association. He lives in Farmington with his wife and three children.