Firm Profile
Wendy Sibbison, a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, has specialized in civil and criminal appeals since 1982, before which she had a general practice for five years in the firm of Lesser, Newman, Sibbison & Souweine in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her appellate clients come from all over Massachusetts and occasionally from other areas of New England; she is admitted to practice before the Massachusetts appellate courts, the United States Supreme Court and the United States Courts of Appeals for the First and Second Circuits. A frequent writer and lecturer on appellate practice, she is a member of the Appellate Bench Bar Committee of the Massachusetts Bar Association.
In 1999 she was appointed by former Chief Justice Herbert P. Wilkins to serve on the Supreme Judicial Court Ad Hoc Committee on Appeals in Cases of Murder in the First Degree, which drafted the amendments to Mass. R. App. P. 19(d) adopted by the Court. She has served as a member of a Hearing Committee on the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, and in 2006 she was appointed to a second term on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation.
Attorney Sibbison is noted for having represented the winning appellants in such precedent-setting civil appeals as Rowley v. Mass. Electric Co., 438 Mass. 798 (2003); Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky, PC, v. Harvard, 436 Mass. 347 (2002); Woods v. O'Neil et al., 54 Mass. App. Ct. 768 (2002), Douillard v. LMR, Inc., 433 Mass. 162 (2001), Rotkiewicz v. Sadowsky, 431 Mass. 748 (2000), Roberts v. Southwestern Bell Mobile Sys., Inc., 429 Mass. 478 (1999), Heins v. Ledis, 422 Mass. 477 (1996), Tatro v. Manor Care, Inc., 416 Mass. 763 (1994), and Deerfield Plastics Co. v. The Hartford , 404 Mass. 484 (1989).
She has obtained reversals in eight first-degree murder cases and was counsel of record for amicus curiae, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in support of the successful appellant in Richardson v. United States, 526 U.S. 813 (1999).