Oak, Elm & Birch Marks 50 Years of Legal Practice in Hartford

HARTFORD, CT — October 14, 2024 — Oak, Elm & Birch LLP marked its 50th anniversary today, five decades after founding partners Samuel Oak and Edwin Birch opened a two-lawyer office on Pratt Street on October 14, 1974. The firm hosted a reception for current attorneys and staff, retired partners, and long-tenured clients at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art on Main Street this evening.

From its original two-attorney practice focused on corporate and real estate work for Hartford-area businesses, the firm has grown to approximately 50 attorneys and staff across six practice groups, with offices at 280 Trumbull Street since 1992. Samuel Oak and Edwin Birch both continue as Of Counsel to the firm, advising on long-standing client matters and on firm governance.

"When Edwin and I signed the lease on Pratt Street in 1974, we thought the firm might grow to eight or ten lawyers," said Samuel Oak, Founding Partner and Of Counsel. "That we are here fifty years later, with grandchildren of our first clients walking into this office, is not something either of us imagined. The people who built this place since — Ariana, Lance, Steven, and the partners before them — deserve most of the credit for what the firm has become."

The firm is preparing a brief institutional history for publication in 2025 and has begun an oral-history project with retired partners, paralegals, and legal secretaries whose tenure at the firm goes back to the 1970s and 1980s. Managing Partner Steven Stone noted that the firm's next fifty years will be shaped by work the current partners and associates are already doing — in technology transactions, cross-border M&A, and the Trusts & Estates practice's generational-wealth matters — but that the firm's core orientation toward Connecticut clients is not going to change.