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For the past fifteen years I have concentrated my practice in the representation of creative individuals and their businesses. That has not, however, always been my sole, or even primary, focus.

After graduating from law school in 1976 I took a job with a small corporate litigation firm on Wall Street. Somewhat to my surprise I found legal work fascinating, and I relished the opportunity to learn the basic skills of corporate and litigation practice. One of our clients was CBS Records and my work on its behalf led to my accepting a position as junior partner in one of the preeminent entertainment litigation firms in the country. I shortly found myself traveling around the world helping to solve problems for some of the leading entertainers of the time, including the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, and Pink Floyd. During these years I also developed a comfort and enjoyment with being in court.

Despite the excitement of my work life in New York, and the many other attractions of the city, once I turned thirty and began to feel ready to start a family, I wanted to find a place to live where I could raise children in fresh air, surrounded by green grass and plenty of trees. I attended college in Massachusetts and particularly loved the Western, less populated, part of the State. My wife Eva and I settled in Northampton during the summer of 1980. I obtained a job teaching litigation theory at Western New England Law School and hung up a shingle. I ran into an old college acquaintance, Ken Neiman, who had been working in the legal services field and was ready to venture into the private practice of law. We formed Fierst and Neiman in October of 1981, sharing the one room office on Main Street which I had rented some months earlier.

Our commitment from the get go was to deliver the same quality of service as could be obtained at the major urban law firms, but for a substantially lesser cost. Even in our early years, when the fees we were collecting amounted to only a trickle, we were determined to hire the best staff we could find and to provide them with the best in equipment with which to work.

Fierst and Neiman was a full service law firm which, over the following years, developed a strong statewide reputation and practice in civil and criminal trials, family law, corporate transactions, torts, commercial and residential real estate, trusts and estates, bankruptcy, social security and labor law. During those years I was responsible for heading our business and litigation practices. All of this began to change in the late 1980's when the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came knocking on my door. They had just begun to launch their property and had heard that I had some experience as a New York entertainment lawyer. I spent most of the next five years traveling the world and helping them to run their thriving Mirage Studios and its worldwide TMNT business while Ken ran our local practice.

 Although the TMNT kept me plenty busy, in 1993 I decided to take on other entertainment clients from around the world. While I have to admit that it seemed an improbable practice to launch from here in small, out of the way  Northampton, it’s worked fabulously and I’ve had the pleasure of  helping some wonderfully creative people from all over the world develop and  prosper from their intellectual properties.

 When Ken was appointed as the Magistrate Judge in the local Federal Court, the Chief of the local U.S. Attorneys Office, John Pucci, joined the firm and we took on the new name of Fierst & Pucci LLP. Over the next few years, as we added lawyers and built up a regional and international clientele, we decided to drop most of the general practice for which Fierst and Neiman had become known, and instead to concentrate in the areas in which we had both expertise and interest. For me that meant focusing on entertainment and licensing law, corporate and business matters and intellectual property. For John it meant focusing on complex civil and criminal litigation, as well as employment and health care law. We soon wanted to expand the litigation practice and brought in Jeff Kinder, who had succeeded John Pucci as Chief of the Western Massachusetts U.S. Attorneys Office. Jeff spent seven great years with us before he left upon his appointment to a Massachusetts Superior Court judgeship. Jon Kane joined us after ten years of private practice and a foray into the high-tech world as COO and general counsel of an internet-based software start-up company, and became a partner in 2005. With Jon, we added an experienced negotiator with a strong background in corporate and transactional work. The most recent additions to the team are J. Lizette Richards, an outstanding and eager young lawyer, Hun Ohm, who returned to the area he had grown to love when he attended Amherst College, and Amanda Schreyer, who joined us as an associate after a stellar career at Suffolk Law School and several years working in the entertainment field in Los Angeles.

Through all these years of growth and change, I, and the firm I founded have kept the same basic goal of delivering first quality services at reasonable prices.