Keogh, Burkhart & Vetter

Our History

In the fall of 1895, John Keogh, a graduate of Norwalk’s public schools with no college education, left behind his job as a drummer on the Fall River steamship line and enrolled in the Yale Law School. Upon graduation in 1897, he entered the practice of law, opening an office on Washington Street in South Norwalk. The Norwalk City Directory that year listed his occupation as “lawyer, cigars, etc.”

In 1908 Attorney Keogh was joined in practice by his law school classmate, Nehemiah Candee, forming the firm of Keogh and Candee. Both of them were active in public life, with Attorney Keogh serving as Corporation Counsel of the City of South Norwalk, Referee in Bankruptcy for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and a member of the 1913 Consolidation Commission that created the modern City of Norwalk.

Judge Candee, for his part, served as a City Court Judge in Norwalk, and a member of both the Connecticut State Senate and General Assembly. While in Hartford, in 1921, he was named, by Special Act of the Legislature, as one of the founding members of the newly-incorporated Bald Head Club of America. In 1931, he was nominated by President Hoover to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippine Islands, though he never served in that position.

In 1917, at the age of 45, John Keogh volunteered for service in World War I, being deployed to France as part of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps and rising to the rank of Captain. Upon discharge, he returned to law practice, where he was joined in the partnership by future U.S. Senator Brien McMahon, and, in 1933, his own son, John Keogh, Jr., himself a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. For the next 10 years, father and son tried case after case together as some of Fairfield County’s premier trial lawyers.

John Keogh, Jr. served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Theater in World War II, and resumed law practice in 1946 upon his return, later serving as a City Court Judge. In the years that followed, Attorney Alfred W. Burkhart (a World War II combat veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps) joined the firm and later became a partner, with the firm becoming Keogh, Candee and Burkhart in 1956. Throughout the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s the firm thrived as a litigation-oriented general practice. Attorney Thomas J. Vetter entered law practice with the firm in 1979 and became a partner in 1985, when the firm became Keogh, Burkhart & Vetter. Having practiced with his father John Keogh, Jr. since joining the bar in 1985, Stephen Keogh became a partner in 1990, and over the course the following years developed a practice focused on elder law and probate matters. Attorney Ellen R. Sutliffe Hain joined him and Attorney Vetter in that practice in 2015.