Thomas Dawson Smith

Thomas Smith enjoys the part of law most people dread: taking a tangled problem and explaining it plainly enough that you can decide what to do next.

Thomas began working in Montpelier in 2008, completing a clerkship while he studied for the New York State Bar Exam. He is a member of the Vermont Bar Association and is admitted to practice law in both Vermont and New York.

Practice experience

Thomas advises clients across the firm’s five practice areas: wills and estate planning, estate administration and assisting executors, credit union law, small business law, and municipal law. It is a deliberately broad practice, the kind a community firm is built to offer, so that a family or a local institution can bring most of what comes up to one attorney who already knows them.

Before Vermont

Thomas came to central Vermont by way of an unusually international career. He worked at the New York State Attorney General’s office, where he provided litigation support in the case of People v. Grasso. He served as a Research Associate at the International Environmental Law Research Center in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was sent as a representative to the World Intellectual Property Organization. While in Geneva, he helped monitor developments at the United Nations Human Rights Commission on behalf of Medical Care Development International.

A note on how Thomas works

Clients tend to describe the same experience. They arrive worried about something they do not fully understand, and they leave knowing what it means and what their options are. That clarity is the point. Good legal advice you cannot follow is not much use.