Shared BC Law degrees, coincidental hiring by the same district attorney, and fortuitous jobs at a Boston law firm turned three BC Law graduates into a trio who made an interesting career move.
It has been over 10 years since Brett Walker ’13, Paul Lewis ’14, and Kevin Bergin ’16 sat together in the classrooms of Newton campus. But mutual admiration and professional respect—which grew out of their close legal moves—led to their reccent unified transition to a new firm, Haynes Boone LLP, as its litigation team.
After their respective graduations from BC Law, the three alums all went to work for the Office of the Suffolk County District Attorney, where they bonded. “Our experience there formed us into a strong trio united by shared values and work ethic,” says Walker, who now serves as counsel for Haynes Boone and is a litigation and trial attorney who has represented large corporate entities and government agencies in high‑profile civil actions.
Bergin, an associate in the Litigation Practice Group, also recalls the time in the DA’s office as one that brought them closer. “Even then, I admired Paul and Brett’s creative and deeply reasoned approaches to their investigations, legal analysis, and courtroom practice. The fact that we all share that background made it a natural fit when the opportunity went to work with both of them again in private practice.”
The beginnings of a cohesive group back then eventually became a litigation team for DLA Piper in Boston for several years. Bergin cites how working together has made them even better lawyers and colleagues: “We regularly push each other’s thinking to find the best solutions to challenging, and often novel, issues facing our clients, and it is an experience that is worth repeating every day.”
The fates aligned again for the trio when the international corporate law firm Haynes Boone established itself in the New England region and opened a Boston office in January 2026. Lewis was first recruited by Haynes Boone in the fall of 2025 to become a partner. Then, the firm was very keen on the possibility of keeping this tight-knit group together and successfully recruited Bergin and Walker. The latter remembers receiving a call—while away for a few days of military duty—from Haynes Boone partner Dan Rosenfeld, who pitched the idea of building a civil litigation team at his firm.
Walker went on to credit Lewis as being the visionary of the group who long ago hoped to bring them all together in private, civil practice and who has helped keep them all connected through their professional careers.
Lewis expressed excitement at the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new office at a firm with a national and global reputation, part of the reasoning behind his making the jump. Citing the opportunity to build on Haynes Boone’s existing litigation reputation, he says, “we saw this as an opportunity to fully spread our wings, to continue to build our practices, to offer more flexible solutions to our clients, and to keep building off of our momentum that has been growing for some time.”
Now settled at their new firm, they are involved in an array of legal work, with Bergin describing much of it as involving instances where “technology is evolving faster than the law,” and dealing with the legal and business challenges this dynamic poses in disputes and government investigations. They are currently working on a number of complex civil litigation cases, such as prosecuting anti-competitive business conduct, defending actions brought under the False Claims Act, and litigating disputes arising from breakups of closely held partnerships or LLCs.
Looking back at his time at BC Law and how it helped prepare him for this work, Walker describes the ethical and moral dimensions of legal thought that he was exposed to as formative.
Bergin named the values of curiosity and preparation that were instilled in him that remain a key part of his fact-finding regimen as a litigator.
Lewis, in particular, remembers his 1L Legal Research and Writing class with Professor Mary Ann Chirba. “I truly believe that I began my journey as a litigator through her course wherein she helped me to develop my own ability to devise arguments on behalf of a (then-hypothetical) client and figure out how best to present them to a busy judge,” he says. “To this day, and especially when I am revising a brief, I still actively think about techniques that she taught me more than a decade ago.”