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Constant Learner

Biannual Law Seminar Renamed to Honor Late Attorney John Sikorski
John Sikorski

The late John Sikorski is being honored in a way that reflects his love of learning and his dual skills in employment and trial law, colleagues say.

Before John Sikorski died last year, at the much-too-young age of 55, he built a reputation in the legal world not just as a skilled lawyer, but someone who never felt he was skilled enough to stop learning.

“John was a voracious legal reader. He’d drive back and forth to Boston listening to legal tapes,” said Jeff McCormick, managing partner of Robinson Donovan, P.C., the Springfield-based law firm where Sikorski had worked for 18 years in employment law.

“And he was an idea man,” McCormick continued. “All the time, I’d come into the office in the morning, and on my desk would be a three-page memo with an idea John had about how we could improve one of the areas of practice in the office, or how we could help somebody become better at their job.

“He was one of those guys who — I wouldn’t say he goaded you — but he’d challenge you all the time to become better. He was always helping us improve. He was a real champion of our office.”

The question, then, for McCormick and his colleagues became, how best to honor Sikorski and keep his memory alive in an appropriate way?

“Every one of us, to a person, said that we have to do something that honors him by continuing the thing that were important to him,” he said. “He was a real champion of continuing legal education, so someone decided to contact MCLE.”

That’s Boston-based Mass. Continuing Legal Education Inc., which presents skills and education programs year-round. “We started talking to them about whether there might be some way we could endow one of their educational programs,” McCormick said, “to fund a program to help pay for people who want to go to an employment law-related seminar but couldn’t pay for it.”

In the end, the firm decided to endow what will now be called ‘Employment Law Trial Skills: The John C. Sikorski MasterClass,’ a workshop held every two years that provides Massachusetts lawyers with advanced education in trying employment cases.

The program will include lectures by experienced trial lawyers, guided discussions, participatory exercises, and advice from judicial panels. Participants will acquire advanced skills for shaping trials, making effective opening statements and closing arguments, conducting direct and cross examination of human-resources professionals, and establishing damages. They will also learn techniques to help them become more effective at assessing both evidence and expert witnesses.

Sikorski would have appreciated being involved in any program that helped employment lawyers bolster their courtroom skills, McCormick said. “John was a really good trial lawyer,” he noted. “There are a lot of employment lawyers who aren’t great trial lawyers, but he had that mix.”

Employment Law Trial Skills takes place every other year at MCLE headquarters in Boston; this year is an off-year, so Sikorski’s name will grace the program starting in March 2010, and then biannually thereafter.

“Because it’s held only every other year, it’s one that historically has been very well-attended,” McCormick said, “so we felt, what could be more fitting than to name it after John? So Robinson Donovan, as a firm, has endowed that program at MCLE in perpetuity.”

McCormick, who served as president of the Mass. Bar Assoc. from 1998 to 2000, recalled that Sikorski had been chair of the MBA Labor and Employment Section, a much-sought-after post in which Sikorski excelled. One reason might have been his constant desire to learn more and pass on what he learned.

“John was a great partner,” he said. “He became known not only in the area but also statewide as someone in the employment-law field who was committed to excellence and always striving to be a better lawyer.”

He was also a multi-faceted individual, McCormick said, noting as one example Sikorski’s passion for flowers and the impressive garden he and his wife built in their backyard. Hopefully, the seminar now offered in his name will have an impact that proves to be just as perennial.

“If you went to his funeral, you would not have imagined that so many people knew John,” McCormick said. “People came from Boston, and a custodian in our building was there, too. John touched so many people’s lives, professionally and personally. He was a great friend, and it was a true loss.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at

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