By Barbara Rabinovitz
barbara.rabinovitz@lawyersweekly.com
Half a century ago, a life in the law in Massachusetts had its limitations - or so Boston attorney Julian J. D'Agostine recalls of his early years in practice.
"The opportunities were very limited," a silvery-haired D'Agostine says, scanning the horizon from the high-rise conference room of Davis, Malm & D'Agostine, the downtown law firm he co-founded with Harold R. Davis and C. Michael Malm.
"In my day, there were only four or five specialties: trial, criminal, tort, probate, conveyancing. ... Today, the areas of law are probably 100 times greater," says D'Agostine, who built a career in land-use law after graduation from Boston College Law School in 1953 and service with the Judge Advocate General Corps in post-Korean War America.
D'Agostine came upon his area of practice by way of his family background. Born in Boston's North End and raised in Brighton, in adulthood he gravitated to the family's construction business and, as an attorney, "started doing a lot of real estate."
But there was another aspect of D'Agostine's young-adult life that would have an even greater impact on his legal career, and that was his JAG experience and the Korean treason/war trials he participated in as a first lieutenant assigned to Fort Devens for three years after law school.
The Army base was the site of trials for U.S. soldiers from the Northeast who had been taken prisoner by the North Koreans during the war. When Chinese communists came to the aid of North Korea, they took responsibility for the American prisoners of war and gave rise to allegations of treason on the part of the POWs.
D'Agostine performed his military service in the mid-1950s, at the same time a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, was waging his infamous witch hunt and leveling career-breaking accusations against those he suspected of being members of the Communist Party and infiltrating the government, notably the U.S. State Department.
It was in that charged atmosphere that D'Agostine took on the defense of U.S. servicemen being tried before so-called security boards and, in some cases, given dishonorable discharges for allegedly sympathizing with communists while in captivity in Korea.
"I was of the opinion that there was no brainwashing of the POWs [by communists], contrary to the government's position; the Chinese treated them well," D'Agostine says.
"By the time I came out [of JAG service] in '57," he continues, "I probably had done over 1,000 trials and board proceedings. It was the best experience."
'Still involved'
While he was stationed at Fort Devens, D'Agostine made his home in nearby Acton with his wife and the first two of what would be a family of seven children. With fellow attorney Louis N. Levine, he hung out a shingle in Acton announcing the law firm of D'Agostine & Levine. The firm endures to this day.
"It was one of the early boutique firms; we specialized in land-use law," says D'Agostine, who acknowledges he was bucking a trend by specializing then.
"In those years, you were either a general practitioner or a trial lawyer," he explains. With his admittedly "unique experience" doing trials as a JAG lawyer and his family background in real estate, D'Agostine was on his way to being a specialist and a trial attorney.
By the late 1970s, he was ready for what he describes as "a bigger venue."
"I had reached a point where I thought I should be able to draw a larger audience," D'Agostine says. "I wasn't getting big-business attention with the Acton firm."
Teaming up with Davis and Malm, in 1979 he opened Davis, Malm & D'Agostine at 1 Federal St.; the firm would later move a few blocks to its current offices at 1 Boston Place. From its three founders, DMD has grown to 38 attorneys.
"I'm basically of counsel," D'Agostine says of his part-time involvement in his firm where, after decades of drafting and lecturing and writing about real estate law, he still works on such cases. "I'm still involved ... but I don't do trial work."
As for retirement, he dismisses the likelihood of that outcome this way: "I will be doing this forever."
As name partner at his own firm, D'Agostine is entitled to choose whether he wants to stay on or step down, but he acknowledges that not all senior professionals, legal or otherwise, have that choice - nor, in some instances, should they, in his opinion.
"Whenever anybody starts to lose their edge ... in any profession, they should slow down or retire," he says, citing as an example an aging surgeon.
'Homey situation'
Two days before his 78th birthday, D'Agostine is telling a visitor that he has spent the previous week skiing in Waterville, N.H., and, despite an early-spring cold, is returning to New Hampshire's slopes that weekend.
The onset of a birthday provides this seemingly indefatigable man an occasion to reflect on his 55 years at the bar and a half-century of dramatic change in his chosen profession - not necessarily for the better, D'Agostine suggests.
"It used to be you knew everybody, and you could then make judgments on the ability and credibility of everybody you were dealing with," he says. "Everything was based on trust; you'd do major transactions based on word of mouth."
For D'Agostine, those years made for "a much more homey situation" for practicing attorneys. "It was a wonderful thing to get up in the morning and go to court and meet your friends and colleagues."
His law firm, enjoying what D'Agostine says is low turnover, fosters that same spirit of collegiality - "that relationship," as he puts it. "But you don't see that as much in the bar."MLW
April 14, 2008
