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Best Lawyers Recognizes Two Dinse Attorneys as Burlington Best Lawyers Lawyer of the Year

Best Lawyers has named Ritchie Berger and Mark Langan of Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew as the Commercial Litigation “Lawyer of the Year” and Trust & Estates “Lawyer of the year”, respectively, for 2014 in the Burlington area. Only a single lawyer in each specialty in each community is being honored as the “Lawyer of the Year.” Best Lawyers compiles its lists of outstanding attorneys through exhaustive peer-review assessments they conduct with thousands of leading lawyers each year.

Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew, P.C., with offices in Burlington, Vermont and Plattsburgh, New York, is one of the oldest and largest law firms serving Vermont and the Adirondack Region of upstate New York. For over 95 years, the firm has served its clients in important cases, transactions and legal developments.

Best Lawyers Recognizes Fourteen Dinse Attorneys

The Best Lawyers in America® 2014 (Copyright 2012 by Woodward/White, Inc., of Aiken, S.C.) in twenty different practice areas. Since it was first published in 1983, Best Lawyers has become universally regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence. Because Best Lawyers is based on an exhaustive peer-review survey in which more than 36,000 leading attorneys cast almost 4.4 million votes on the legal abilities of other lawyers in their practice areas, and because lawyers are not required or allowed to pay a fee to be listed, inclusion in Best Lawyers is considered a singular honor. Corporate Counsel magazine has called Best Lawyers “the most respected referral list of attorneys in practice.”

The practice areas and the attorney(s) listed in each area are as follows:

  • Commercial Litigation: Ritchie E. Berger, Samuel Hoar, Jr., Karen McAndrew
  • Corporate Compliance: David Gurtman
  • Corporate Governance Law: Brian Murphy
  • Corporate Law: Jeffrey J. McMahan, Brian R. Murphy
  • Employment Law – Management: Amy M. McLaughlin, Jeffrey J. Nolan
  • Immigration Law: Leigh Polk Cole
  • Insurance Law: Barbara E. Cory
  • Litigation – Construction: Karen McAndrew
  • Litigation – Environmental: Samuel Hoar, Jr.
  • Litigation – Intellectual Property: Shapleigh Smith, Jr.
  • Litigation – Labor & Employment: Amy M. McLaughlin
  • Medical Malpractice Law – Defendants: Ritchie E. Berger, Samuel Hoar, Jr.
  • Mergers & Acquisitions Law: Brian R. Murphy
  • Non-Profit / Charities Law: Brian R. Murphy
  • Personal Injury Litigation – Defendants: Ritchie E. Berger, Samuel Hoar, Jr., Karen McAndrew
  • Product Liability Litigation – Defendants: Shapleigh Smith, Jr.
  • Real Estate Law: Austin D. Hart, Molly K. Lebowitz
  • Tax Law: Mark A. Langan
  • Technology Law: Jeffrey J. McMahan
  • Trusts and Estates: Mark A. Langan

Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew, P.C., with offices in Burlington, Vermont and Plattsburgh, New York, is one of the oldest and largest law firms serving Vermont and the Adirondack Region of upstate New York. For over 95 years, the firm has served its clients in important cases, transactions and legal developments.

Benchmark Litigation Recognizes Karen McAndrew as one of the Top 250 Women in Litigation

Dinse is pleased to announce that Karen McAndrew has been included among Benchmark Litigation’s Top 250 Women in Litigation. This distinction is given based primarily on targeted research completed during the US Benchmark Litigation review process and is dedicated to honoring America’s leading female trial lawyers. Important elements during this research were peer review and overall depth of their litigation careers. Top 250 Women in Litigation features female litigators from all 50 states.

Karen McAndrew has had an active litigation practice for more than 30 years, and is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. She has tried numerous cases to verdict in both state and federal courts, has handled appeals to the Vermont Supreme Court as well as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and has represented clients in arbitrations and mediations.

Jeff Nolan Active in Threat Assessment and Violence Prevention

In recent months, Jeff Nolan of Dinse’s Higher Education and Employment Practice Groups has been very active in advising and training clients, and doing presentations for international and national audiences, on threat assessment and violence prevention issues. Jeff’s recent presentations include a session on the legal aspects of threat assessment for the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, two half-days of training on campus threat assessment for disability service providers at the University of Connecticut’s Postsecondary Disability Training Institute in Boston, and a session on cutting edge campus threat assessment issues at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of College and University Attorneys in Philadelphia. Jeff also recently co-presented, to an international audience, an Employment Law Alliance webinar on workplace violence prevention and intervention.

Construction Litigation Team Prevails in Multi-Million Dollar Lawsuit

The Construction Litigation Team, headed by Shap Smith, successfully defended a large commercial construction company in a multi-party lawsuit filed by two corporations seeking combined damages in excess of $10 million based on alleged construction defects. The dismissal was granted based on a motion principally drafted by Andy MacIlwaine. Sophie Zdatny, Angela Clark, and Joe Wonderly also contributed significant research and drafting in the course of the litigation. Team paralegal Louise Reese deftly managed an extremely high-volume document case.

Karen McAndrew and Andy MacIlwaine co-edit Vermont Chapter of 2013 Product Liability Desk Reference

Karen McAndrew and Andy MacIlwaine served as editors of the Vermont chapter for the 2013 edition of “Product Liability Desk Reference: A Fifty-State Compendium” published internationally by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. The Vermont chapter analyzes current and developing jurisprudence on multiple issues pertaining to the discrete practice area of product liability. Questions about the chapter or related issues should be directed to Karen McAndrew (kmcandrew@dinse.com) or Andy MacIlwaine (amacilwaine@dinse.com).