Kennedy was president, John Glenn orbited the Earth, and West Side Story won an Oscar in 1962, the year that attorney John Vlahos began working at the firm that became Hanson Bridgett. He was the eighth member of a company that would grow to more than 300 employees, and he would serve for many years as its managing partner. In 2005 John announced his retirement, but it never quite took, and he finished his last case in 2015.
Vlahos, who died on February 9, 2017 after a 10-month-long battle with lung cancer, was nothing if not a devoted lawyer. Ironically, he almost never became one at all. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics from the University of California in 1957, he enrolled in an LSAT class. But he blew it off after two sessions. “I couldn’t hear very well and was falling asleep,” he would later recall, “so I quit.” After a last-minute binge of studying, he managed to get into Boalt Hall, but there, too, his attendance was spotty, and he dropped out during his first semester.
