Following the war, Tim completed Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and in 1949 he became a civilian attorney in the Navy Department. In 1954, he was assigned to the Office of the General Counsel of the Navy Department, headed by F. Trowbridge vom Baur. Tim’s many accomplishments included the role of editor and contributor to Navy Contract Law, for years the only single authoritative treatise on government contract law.
In 1963, Tim joined the firm later known as vom Baur, Coburn, Simmons & Turtle, for the practice of government contract law, one of the first such firms in the country. Following other law firm affiliations, Tim was a solo practitioner in Washington, DC, from 1992 until his retirement in 2013.
In addition to his work for the Section of Public Contract Law, Tim was a longtime member of the Procurement Division of the National Defense Industrial Association and chaired its legal committee for several years. He authored or edited books on government contract law and wrote many articles on that subject.
Tim was a formidable attorney and widely read intellectual. Toward the end of his life, he re-read The Odyssey and The Iliad. Before our visit on Tim’s 100th birthday, I asked his nephew Lawrence “Lawrie” Coburn for a gift suggestion. Tim told Lawrie he was uncomfortable because he hadn’t sent me a present for my birthday. Upon Lawrie’s insistence that this was a special birthday, Tim relented and requested a copy of Justice John Paul Stevens’s memoir, The Making of a Justice. On his 100th birthday, when Dick Johnson and I delivered the Stevens book, we found Tim revisiting the classic, The Life of Henry Adams.
Tim personified the best of his generation: duty to country and family, intellectual rigor, integrity, and devotion to the highest standards of the legal profession.