Utah Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Thomas Lee has announced his plans following his retirement from the court after 13 years. Lee said he will launch two national firms when he steps down on June 30.
One of the two new compamies will provide linguistic consulting services for use in a broad range of cases in which the public meaning of the language of law is at stake, Lee said. A core element of the firm’s services will comprise the tools of “corpus linguistics” — tools that Lee pioneered as an aid to legal interpretation while serving as a judge. The second firm will be devoted to high-stakes federal and state appeals, including cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Lee’s law firm will have offices in Utah and Washington, D.C.{mprestriction ids="1,3"}
“In my work as a judge, I was focused on promoting the transparency of legal decision-making and advancing the rule of law. And the development and advancement of the tools of corpus linguistics will be essential to continuing that work,” Lee said. “I look forward to a new chapter in my career in which I can further the rule of law in both consulting work and in a role as an advocate in high-stakes appeals,” a role Lee played in courts throughout the nation prior to his appointment to the bench in 2010.
In addition to Lee, the firm, to be named Corpus Juris Advisors, will include Jesse Egbert, a professor of corpus linguistics at Northern Arizona University, whose work was discussed during oral arguments by the U.S. Supreme Court in March. Corpus Juris Advisors will also provide trademark law-related expert witness services with the aid of two trademark survey experts, Brigham Young University business professors Eric DeRosia and Glenn Christensen.
Lee’s move into this field is a natural given his family background. His father, Rex Lee, started the nation’s first Supreme Court practice group at a national firm after serving as the solicitor general of the United States in the 1980s. Now such a practice is standard.
Before becoming a judge, in addition clerking on the U.S. Supreme Court, Lee had extensive appellate experience, with arguments in numerous federal courts of appeals and in the U.S. Supreme Court, making Lee one of the few attorneys in Utah to ever argue in that court.
In launching the appellate law firm, Lee Nielsen, Lee will be joined by John Nielsen, an assistant solicitor general for the state of Utah. In that role, Nielsen has argued over 70 cases in the Utah Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals, written briefs in six U.S. Supreme Court cases and worked on several others. He served as a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow for the National Association of Attorneys General.
“After working on over 100 appeals for the state of Utah, I’m energized by the challenge of starting a national appellate law firm,” said Nielsen. “And to be able to do so with someone of Tom’s reputation — who is a friend and mentor — is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
“I know of only a handful of attorneys in the nation who have Tom’s combined appellate experience as both an attorney and a judge,” said U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, Justice Lee’s younger brother. “And no attorney understands how to apply corpus linguistics to legal interpretation as well as he does.”
“This revolution is already coming to fruition,” Thomas Lee said, “and this is an opportune time to continue the push that I began on the ‘judge side of the bench.’”
Lee said that at least for the next year, he will also teach classes that overlap with his areas of expertise at Brigham Young University and will teach classes in advanced interpretation as an adjunct professor at the law schools at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.{/mprestriction}
