Bar association head leads ‘big tent’ Organization elects Merrill Merchants official as voice for Maine lawyers

BANGOR – In a state where most lawyers consider themselves to be general practitioners, the career path of the new president of the Maine State Bar Association is full of twists and turns.

Meris J. Bickford, 52, is a vice president at Merrill Merchants Bank in Bangor, where she is a bank trust administrator.

For 20 years, however, Bickford worked in the child welfare field, first in the Maine Attorney General’s Office and later as the director of Child and Family Services at the Department of Human Services.

“As MSBA president,” she said, “one of the primary things I do is create an identity and a voice for a pretty broad constituency of lawyers. … We create an identity at the Legislature and in the public. We try to be the voice of the practitioner in Maine, even though our members include criminal defense attorneys and prosecutors as well as people who represent insurance companies and those who seek recovery from them.”

Bickford was elected president of the 3,200-member organization earlier this month at its annual meeting in Rockport after serving one year as president-elect. She has served for 11 years on the bar association’s board of governors and was the first public sector lawyer elected to the board.

Born in Bar Harbor, she attended 20 schools before she graduated from high school.

“I was raised by a band of gypsies,” she joked on Friday. “Dad was in the [Maine] Forest Service, and we moved from fire tower to fire tower.”

She graduated from the University of Maine with a history degree before attending the University of Maine Law School in Portland. Leigh I. Saufley, chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, hired Bickford for her first job in the Attorney General’s Office. The two women have remained friends.

“One of the things I very much hope to do,” Bickford said, “is increase and enhance the relationship with the judiciary – between those who advocate and those who make decisions.

“Every judge nominated by the governor and approved by the Legislature has to be a lawyer,” she noted. “Sometimes judges become isolated from the legal profession, but we could enhance that relationship.”

Although she appears to have traveled far from her career roots in child and family welfare law, Bickford still believes that Maine lawyers can learn more about the subject. She hopes to bring national experts to the bar association’s summer meeting to discuss the link between animal abuse and domestic violence.

“I’m anxious to get people in this state to focus on animal welfare law and how that relates to how people do or don’t understand violence,” Bickford said. “Lawyers even don’t recognize the link between these two things.”

As president of the MSBA, her focus is not just on state issues. Bickford explored the topic of tort reform in her first column as president in a recent edition of the organization’s magazine.

President Bush has called for caps on pain and suffering awards in lawsuits and has blamed some of the increases in health care costs on malpractice suits.

Bickford warned that if Bush’s efforts are successful, “economic justice may just go the way of the physician’s house call.” She also suggested that the president look to Maine for a solution.

“… Maine lawyers possess a demonstrated tradition of addressing systemic issues in an even-handed, equitable manner,” she wrote. “Perhaps President Bush and his policy advisers on the issue of tort reform might study the system Maine employs in its mandatory prelitigation and mediation screening panels … Maine’s system is far from perfect, but it preserves access to justice while winnowing out frivolous cases. …”

Access to justice for all Maine’s residents is important to the MSBA, according to Bickford. She said that through the Maine Bar Foundation, the MSBA’s charitable arm, thousands of dollars are raised each year to provide legal services to the elderly, the disabled, the poor and others who would have difficulty obtaining them otherwise.

Bickford’s term expires next January.