Joseph Steinfield was born and raised in Claremont, New Hampshire. He spent the first 38 years of his legal career at Hill & Barlow in Boston. After that firm dissolved in 2002, he joined Prince Lobel Tye in Boston. He has been a full-time New Hampshire resident since 2014 and maintains an office at 130 Court Street in Keene.
Joe has won many multi-million dollar jury verdicts on behalf of his clients, and he has tried virtually every type of lawsuit, in state and federal courts in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. He has argued many appeals, including landmark cases in the highest courts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire and in the First and Second Circuits.
Joe has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America since the inception of that publication more than 30 years ago and is cited in its most recent edition (2021) in three categories – “’Bet the Company’ litigation,” Commercial Litigation, and “Litigation – First Amendment.”
Joe served as Law Clerk to Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Paul C. Reardon.
Involvement in Bar and Community Activities
During his career, Joe has been active in many legal and community organizations, including the following:
- Governor Deval Patrick appointed him to the City of Boston Finance Commission, a watchdog agency that monitors expenditures by the City.
- The Chief Justice of the Trial Court appointed him to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct, which he chaired for two years.
- The Chief Justice of Massachusetts appointed him to the Massachusetts Clients’ Security Board, and as the Board’s Chair he presided over hearings involving a lawyer’s theft of over $17 million from his clients.
- Governor Michael Dukakis appointed him as a trustee of Roxbury Community College.
- Governor Francis Sargent appointed him as Chair of the Massachusetts Drug Program Review Board.
- He is the Founder and former Chair of the Law Clerks’ Society of the Supreme Judicial Court.
- He served as a member of the New Hampshire Bar Association Board of Governors from 2018 to 2021.
- Joe has been a member of many civic and professional boards, including Celebrity Series of Boston, Partners for Youth With Disabilities, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, and the Colonial Theatre in Keene, NH.
Teaching, Speaking and Writing Activities
- Joe is an adjunct professor of law at both Boston College Law School and the University of New Hampshire Law School. He is also a member of the CALL (Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning) faculty in Keene, where he teaches courses on constitutional law. He has taught courses on constitutional law, freedom of speech and press, mediation and negotiation, and American jury trials at several foreign universities – Adyghe State University in the Russian Republic of Adygheya (2008); Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg (2011); the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) Faculty of Law (2016); and the University of Iceland (2016 and 2019).
- He has been a guest lecturer on the subjects of alternative dispute resolution, trial advocacy, freedom of speech, and other legal topics at many continuing legal education programs and at colleges, universities, and libraries, including University of New Hampshire Law School, Franklin Pierce University, Harvard Law School, Northeastern University, Boston University, Idaho State, and the University of Nevada Law School. In November 2016 he was a guest speaker at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, where he spoke on the subject of “Blasphemy in Modern Times.” In March 2018 he returned to Newport to speak on the subject of Constitutional Law.
- He has published over 200 articles in journals and newspapers, including the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and the Keene Sentinel. His “Looking Back” column has appeared monthly in the Ledger-Transcript since 2006. He is now also a monthly opinion columnist for the Keene Sentinel, where he writes about the law. He also publishes op ed columns periodically in the Concord Monitor.
- He has organized and chaired conferences at several universities, including Northeastern University, Suffolk Law School, University of Hawaii, and Boston University. In 2009 he organized and chaired a symposium entitled “Terrorism, Media and the Law,” held at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. He currently chairs the American College of Trial Lawyers “Teaching Abroad” Committee.
- In May 2014 his collected essays were published under the title Claremont Boy: My New Hampshire Roots and the Gift of Memory (Bauhan Publishing). His second book, Time for Everything: My Curious Life, will be published in the spring of 2022.
- Joe has been a guest on many radio and television programs, including “Greater Boston” (WGBH Channel 2), CNN, New York Public Television’s “Digital Age” (you can watch him on “Digital Age: A Case from Nowhere”) and WHMP Northampton (you can hear him on “A Sense of Place”).
