At the annual summer meeting of the Maine State Bar Association, held in Bar Harbor, Attorney Drew Ketterer was honored with a Lifetime Achievement award.

Drew Ketterer was orphaned at the age of 13 and forced to live on $90 a month of social security survivor benefits. He did manage to complete high school and played football for Fairfield University. In 1971 he became the first male graduate of Connecticut College for Women, in New London Connecticut, now known as Connecticut College. He graduated sixth out of a class of 316 with the distinction of Magna Cum Laude. Earning a scholarship through college and law school, he graduated from Boston’s Northeastern University School of Law, 50 years ago in 1974.

His first employment as a lawyer was with the Roxbury Defenders Committee, defending indigent felony cases by day and serving as a faculty member at Suffolk University School of Law, teaching criminal trial practice.

After five years of practicing law in Boston he returned to Maine to open a general practice law firm in Norridgewock, Somerset County. To this day he has remained in Norridgewock as a trial lawyer.

He was appointed by two Maine Governors to chair the state ethics commission, charged with enforcing the state election laws.

He has served in all three branches of Maine government. He first was in the judicial branch as a Complaint Justice, authorized to issue search and arrest warrants. He later served two terms in the House of Representatives, assigned to the Judiciary Committee. Finally, he served in the third branch of government as a three-term elected attorney general, of the State of Maine.

While serving as Maine’s AG he successfully completed five Boston Marathons and successfully sued the tobacco industry in the case Maine v. Philip Morris. He received what is believed to be the largest civil judgment in the history of the state of Maine, with a judgment in the amount of $1.4 billion. He represented Maine in the United States Supreme Court case of Alden v. Maine.

After serving as Maine’s Attorney General, he returned to the law firm he founded in 1979, in Norridgewock, and developed an attorney general practice. In July 2014 his son Andrew became a partner in the law firm, now known as Ketterer & Ketterer, with offices in Maine and Florida.

His service to the legal profession, included serving as the president of the Somerset County Bar Association as well as being elected to the Maine Bar Association Board of Governors for three terms. He was also elected to serve as president for the New England Bar Association.