New Member Profile: Adam Herron
It is my extreme pleasure to provide the section with biographical background for this issue’s new member, Adam Herron. Adam is a 2022 summa cum laude graduate of Albany Law School and a 2019 magna cum laude graduate of the Oregon State University College of Forestry. He was a dynamic, brilliant, and unrivaled student, and NYSBA is fortunate to have him as an attorney.
Adam reports that law school was challenging and enlightening. He describes an important moment in law school at the end of his first semester: “I was on a boat on a vacation with my dad and brother, trying to distract myself from my belief that I had probably flunked out of law school despite working as hard as I could. My grades trickled in during a brief liaison with some wi-fi and I couldn’t believe that the opposite had happened and I had done pretty well. After that, I knew that if I could keep up the same effort, my hard work would pay off in ways I wouldn’t have believed in my past life.”
Despite his humility, Adam was an accomplished law student. He was consistently at the top of his class, modeling his hard work and leadership for those around him. One of his publications, entitled Climate Change and the Water Trap: Considering Western Water Policy Through Socio-Ecological Trap Theory, is an impressive interdisciplinary look at how the allocation of scarce water resources can create a complicated dependency that does not allow for policy reversal or reallocation: in some areas, such as agriculture in Arizona or domestic water needs in Los Angeles, we find that some water allocations have created a dependency on the continuing delivery of water, resulting in difficulties allocating the water to other pressing needs. Adam’s work is pathbreaking, and I have cited his scholarship on several occasions.
Adam currently serves as an associate attorney at Phillips Lytle, LLP in Albany, where he focuses his practice on the energy sector, assisting clients with matters related to the development of renewable energy projects, including regulatory matters before the New York State Public Service Commission and Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions. He assists clients with matters related to the development of renewable energy projects. He truly enjoys the work: “I like being a part of and working with the legal system because it permeates our society at a foundational, and even atomic, level. Every action and consequence that we take, small or large, flows through and is informed by law. To be a part of the practice of this system is simultaneously humbling and empowering.”
Adam grew up in southern New Jersey and attended college in coastal North Carolina. Then he moved to Hawaii “to live my dream as an ocean lifeguard and to test myself in the large surf.” Adam and his wife have since started a family and settled in scenic southern Vermont near the Green Mountain National Forest. “My family and I live in a very rural part of southern Vermont on an old farm made up of fields, heirloom apple trees and sugar bushes of old sugar maples. My wife is a lifelong New Englander who had previous success in real estate in Hawaii which she carried on when returning to Vermont to settle down. I have two young boys who are wild, barefooted adventurers and who relish at the chance to play music, jump in a canoe, or play in the snow.” In addition to being a devoted father and husband, Adam spends the majority of his time fly fishing, canoeing, and snowboarding, while occasionally getting to the coast to keep his love of surfing alive.
