I am Lee Gesmer

This blog is about the areas of legal practice that I find interesting, and that I have time and motivation to write about. I hope that it will be a resource, in particular, for people interested in legal developments in the Massachusetts State and Federal courts.

The blog posts provide legal information, not legal advice. It seems silly to say this, but you shouldn’t do anything that might affect your legal rights in reliance on what you read here. You should consult your own lawyer. (Yes, that was silly – who would rely on a blog written by someone they don’t know?).

My Background

After graduating from Boston College Law School (great school, highly recommend it) in 1979 I foolishly decided to explore regions outside of New England for a change, and migrated to Washington, D.C., to work at the antitrust and litigation powerhouse now know as “Howrey” (then Howrey, Simon, Baker & Murchinson). [Update: Howrey folded in the spring of 2011].

After a couple of years I decided my best bet was to return to Boston (which I had concluded was greatly preferable to D.C. on most counts) before I expired from overwork and job-induced stress at Howrey.  It seemed that the firm’s modus operandi was to load associates up with fantasy research projects on Friday afternoons.  The projects would then be placed in the circular file on Monday morning, never again to see the light of day.

To my great good fortune I obtained employment at the Boston firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, where I worked at a much more gentlemanly pace (but still quite hard) with much nicer people, and was given vastly more responsibility.

As the “PC Revolution” took shape in the early ’80s it occurred to me that a firm that focused on that industry might provide clients with skills that the seemingly technology-illiterate (and, at the time, disinterested) firms in the area lacked. Today people take technology for granted, but in 1986 this was unimaginable.  No one owned a computer, foresaw laptop computers, the Internet, smart phones, the digitization of music and books, the explosion of information and data, the benefits technology would bring to science, medicine and the Third World, or any of the stuff that gets people excited now.

I was right in 1986, and thirty years later, to my surprise, I’m still right.  I think that Gesmer Updegrove LLP provides representation to high technology clients that is rivaled by few firms in New England.

If I’d known how hard it would be to build a firm from nothing, the late nights and weekends, cut-throat competition and difficult clients I probably …. hmm …. better leave the rest of that thought to the imagination.

The photos of Boston in the late 1800s and early 1900s that appear in the masthead of this blog are mostly taken from the Library of Congress “American Memory” collection.