Seth W. Brewster is an American lawyer based in Portland, Maine, whose practice has centered on commercial litigation and antitrust law. He studied at Dartmouth College and Boston University School of Law, was admitted to the bars of Massachusetts and Maine in the late 1980s, and earlier worked as a legislative aide to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell.
Background
Seth Brewster was born on January 8, 1960, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up in Manchester, Maine, where his father worked for Central Maine Power, a major electric utility serving much of the state.
He attended the local public school until his junior year of high school, when he transferred to Deerfield Academy. Founded in 1797 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the school is one of the oldest secondary schools in the United States. It separated from the public Dickinson High School in 1923 and became a private boarding school.
Education
Brewster graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982 with a double major in engineering sciences and economics, receiving a Bachelor of Arts with distinction. Founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges and combines undergraduate liberal arts instruction with graduate professional schools.
He then studied at Boston University School of Law, where he earned a Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1987. Founded in 1872, the law school is part of Boston University, and its graduates entered the bar examinations of Massachusetts and Maine, as Brewster did.
Career
After graduating from Dartmouth, Brewster worked for Arthur Andersen Consulting in New York City. Arthur Andersen was an accounting and consulting firm founded in Chicago in 1913, and its consulting practice later became Accenture. He then went to law school in Boston and took the bar examinations in Massachusetts and Maine.
He was admitted to practice in Massachusetts in 1987 and in Maine in 1988, and was also admitted to the federal district courts for Maine and Massachusetts. He then joined Ropes & Gray as an associate, practicing securities and antitrust litigation for about three years. Founded in Boston in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law School graduates, the firm had shifted toward corporate law by the late nineteenth century. The oral history interview also describes a clerkship for Judge William G. Young.
For three years Brewster served on the legislative staff of Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, working as a trade legislative aide. Mitchell led the Senate majority from 1989 to 1995, and the interview covers the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
In early 1995 he joined Verrill Dana as a partner. Founded in Portland, Maine, in 1862, the firm was one of the state's largest law practices and was renamed Verrill in 2019. Brewster's work there centered on commercial litigation, antitrust, and business disputes. In one matter, after an arbitrator ruled that Maine's dealership law applied extraterritorially, he helped amend the statute so that it covered only Maine dealers, with the amendment applied to the pending case.
He has also practiced with Jensen Baird, a Maine law firm with offices in Portland and Kennebunk that has provided legal services in Maine and New England since 1952.
Membership
Brewster is a member of the Maine State Bar Association, a professional association of lawyers practicing in Maine. Membership gives practicing attorneys a forum for professional exchange and the profession's shared standards.
