Page 30 - BusinessWest January 23, 2023

Nicole Bercume and Andrew Bass live in the 28-home development in Hadley that Nicole’s father started and she completed after his death.
Bercume had interest in the family business, but in her early 20s, the timing wasn’t right. “He was still working aggressively, and at that point, he was doing everything him- self, so there wouldn’t have been a substantial role for me.”
So she went to college and law school in Florida, met Bass, and moved back to Hadley in 2015 and passed the Massachu- setts bar. She started working at a firm in Northampton, while Bass started his own firm; in 2019, they bought a building on Route 9 in Hadley, which today houses Bass/Bercume Law Offices. Bercume handled the firm’s real-estate practice, while Bass handled the litigation practice.
Bass started out in consumer-protection work, particularly around Massachusetts’ lemon law. “That was really strong,
so I started doing those cases all over the state; they mostly went to litigation because the dealerships wouldn’t resolve the cases, so that’s how I got into litgation,” he recalled. “After I got
rolling, I got into construction litigation because Nicole’s dad had a lot of cases, so litigation became my core focus.”
Cases in that realm include land-use issues, contracts, and purchas-
her father’s traditional focus on Hadley and Amherst.
“Forty years is a long time,” Bercume said as she and Bass took BusinessWest on a walking tour of the development. “My
parents started it together right when I was born, and they just went from there. Once I got older, I realized how talented of a businessman and builder my dad was. It’s not just that
he would build homes; this was all wooded land, so he would design the actual subdivision. He would design the roads, and that takes a lot of skill.”
When he died at age 81, “he was still plugging away,” she added. “He always loved to work. All his subs worked for him for a long time. All the guys have known me since I was little, and I was very lucky to have learned from my father.”
Winding Path
“My father really had such a great process. Even if you didn’t like my dad, you definitely respected him because he
was an astute
businessman, and
he was just on top
of it.”
Bercume
Continued on page 41
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