Awarded attorney who sought to ‘assure inclusion of all’
While building a busy career in corporate and securities law, Richard Soden could have been content with just his partnership at the prestigious Boston firm Goodwin, Procter & Hoar when he arrived in 1969 as a summer associate.
Instead, through community work so extensive that at times it seemed as if there must be two Richard Sodens, he helped guide boards of numerous organizations including the New England Aquarium, the Boy Scouts, and the Judge Baker Children’s Center — all while serving as a mentor to young lawyers who might otherwise have felt marginalized as the city’s legal circles slowly diversified over the past 50 years.
“I joke with people that I’m a hired gun at day so I can do social good at night,” he told The Boston Globe in 1994 when, at 49, he became president of the Boston Bar Association and only the second Black lawyer to hold the position.
Mr. Soden, whose work was recognized with awards and fellowships in his name to help continue his work increasing the number of women and people of color in the profession, died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack on Christmas Day in Colorado while he and his wife were visiting their sons. He was 78 and lived in the South End.
“We don’t do what we do to get awards, we do what we do because it makes us feel good to help other people,” he once said. “It feeds our souls and gives us a reason for living by putting the tools we use to do business to work toward the betterment of society.”
Nevertheless, he was honored with many awards, including the Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Bar Association in 2009 for decades of promoting diversity in the profession. Mr. Soden invested years of work in the association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Section.
In Boston and throughout New England, he volunteered time in leadership roles with the Boy Scouts’ Boston Minuteman Council and Northeast Region’s Executive Board, and United South End Settlements, which provides programs to help families seeking economic mobility.
“I think many people who knew Richard had no idea of how much he did outside the firm and the profession,” said Regina M. Pisa, a partner and chair emerita of the firm now known as Goodwin.
And that, she said, was in addition to his duties as “the consummate corporate lawyer,” helping build a significant area of Goodwin’s work.
“So much of what we have at the firm in terms of our securities practice and how it evolved over the years started with Richard,” Pisa said.
She was among many young associates for whom Mr. Soden was a key mentor — “the first partner who took an interest in my career.”
Mr. Soden filled the same role for Paul W. Lee, a retired Goodwin partner who was the first president of the Asian American Lawyers Association of Massachusetts.
“He was just so reassuring and caring. I would not have made partner without Richard’s help,” Lee said. “He kind of adopted me, was in my office every day talking to me, helping me off the ledge sometimes, and undoubtedly advocating for my work to the partners.”
The two were also “colleagues in the community,” Lee said, “working within our own communities, but also bridging communities and promoting collaborations between communities of color.”
Mr. Soden’s guidance was inspirational to people such as J. Keith Motley, chancellor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Boston, who worked with him on civic activities including the Boy Scouts.
“I now have modeled lots of the leadership that I have done on Richard’s leadership,” Motley said. “He was kind, he was innovative, and he could drive an organization without making you feel that he was trying to be so in charge that he was pressuring people.”
Mr. Soden, Motley said, “was just an incredible role model.”
Richard A. Soden was born in New York City on Feb. 16, 1945, and grew up the son of successful immigrants in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section.
His mother, Clara Elaine Soden, was from Barbados, and his father, Dr. Hamilton D. Soden, was from Trinidad and ran his medical practice on the ground floor of the family’s brownstone.
“My father, who came to this country as a teenager with only an eighth-grade education, had followed that immigrant tradition of holding multiple jobs while going to school at night ultimately to become a doctor and a respected member of his community,” Mr. Soden said when receiving the Boston Bar Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
From his father, he added, he learned “the meaning of the phrase, ‘Outwork them, outthink them, and outlast them.’ "
Mr. Soden’s sister, Pamela Soden of New York City, said that for their father, “education was the most important thing.” He carefully chose the private schools his children attended.
Initially intending to follow his father into the medical profession, Mr. Soden switched from pre-med to pre-law at Hamilton College, from which he graduated in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree.
While at Hamilton he and Marcia Mitchell were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. While waiting just inside his fraternity house, she watched him descend the stairs.
“In my head I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m going to marry him,’ " she recalled, and they did in 1969, while he was attending the Boston University School of Law, from which he graduated in 1970.
Working at Goodwin initially as a summer associate, and then returning after graduation and a clerkship at the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Mr. Soden spent his entire career at the firm while remaining in Boston with his family.
“He was just doing so well in Boston,” Marcia said. “I was working at the schools and enjoyed it very much. We liked this city. We’ve been here 50 years and I still think it’s a great place.”
At work, Mr. Soden “stood out for his willingness to be a mentor not just for young associates, but for anyone at the firm. He was a very wise man and he had great perspective,” Pisa said.
When she and others sought his counsel at difficult moments, “you got the best perspective and you got a positive outcome. He would help you figure out not just how to deal with the issue you were dealing with, but how to make it a positive experience in your life.”
In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. Soden leaves two sons, Matthew of Aurora, Colo., and Mark of Denver; and three granddaughters.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Feb. 8 in Trinity Church in Copley Square.
During his years in many leadership roles, including with the Boston Bar Association, Mr. Soden emphasized the need to “assure a just society” by welcoming all into the legal profession, regardless of where they began their lives.
“As we are witness to the rise of the politics of racial and economic division, I would like to remind us all that we will succeed not by ignoring our differences, but by acknowledging and embracing them,” he said in his 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award speech. “It is by the work of each of you in this room that we can assure inclusion of all in our great profession.”