Russell F. Hilliard
First District (2020 – 2023)
Senior Partner, Upton and Hatfield, LLP, New Hampshire
Cornell Law School, J.D., 1976
Russ is a native of New Hampshire and has spent his professional career at the Concord law firm of Upton and Hatfield, LLP (founded in 1908), where he is now the senior partner. For the last 15 years he has operated from the firm’s branch office in Portsmouth. His practice focuses on professional responsibility and commercial litigation.
Russ is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, inducted in 1995. He taught professional responsibility at Franklin Pierce Law Center (now UNH School of Law) for 10 years and was a visiting lecturer at Tumaini University (now University of Iringa) in Tanzania in 2009 and 2012, leading courses in insurance law and judicial and legal ethics.
Following his time as a professor there, he and his wife now spend two months each year in central Tanzania doing volunteer work for the Lutheran church, Russ working remotely and taking advantage of the seven-hour time difference.
Russ is a newly elected member of the Board and will serve until August 2023. He has been a member of the House since 2006, initially serving as the New Hampshire Bar Association delegate, and then the New Hampshire state delegate.
Prior to his time in the House, Russ served as an officer of the New Hampshire Bar Association, President 2003–04, and as chair of the New Hampshire Bar Foundation, 2005–06. His first bar association position was as president of the Merrimack County Bar Association in 1978, a distant, but wonderful memory for him.
Russ earned his B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1973, his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 1976, and his L.L.M. in taxation from Boston University School of Law in 1985. He has participated on numerous CLE panels on trial practice, insurance issues, legislative developments, and professional ethics.
Russ was a founding member of the Hopkinton, New Hampshire, Rotary club, serving as its charter president in 1996, and is now an honorary lifetime member. He is a member of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Newington, New Hampshire, where he served as council president in 2010. He was inducted into the Pembroke Academy Hall of Fame in 2008.
Russ and his wife Jo live in Portsmouth, and between them have five children and seven (and counting) grandchildren.