Brent G. Summers

Attorney Brent Summers retired from TNS Law in 2022.

Brent Summers has practiced law in Oregon for 37 years with an emphasis on litigation of commercial disputes involving real estate and land use, construction and business.  Since his first days in practice in 1982, he has extensive experience in creditors’ rights and bankruptcy matters.  His approach to dispute resolution calls for swiftly mastering the salient facts and obtaining the documents and evidence necessary to enable the parties to participate in a meaningful, early mediation.

Brent also serves as a mediator.  He has participated in hundreds of mediations, primarily as an advocate in construction, real estate, business and creditors’ rights disputes.  He has served as mediator in several business and construction disputes.

Brent has also been engaged on numerous occasions as an expert witness, both on the standard of care for lawyers practicing debtor-creditor law in this community, and on the issue of reasonable attorney fees in cases where a prevailing party is awarded fees.

Brent was board certified in Business Bankruptcy by the American Board of Certification between 1994 and 2018 (last certified in 2014; allowed his certification to expire December 31, 2018).  Brent has presented at more than a hundred seminars for industry groups and lawyers on bankruptcy, creditor’s rights, uniform commercial code, real estate, construction law, and litigation.  In 2013 Brent received the William F. Stiles Award of Merit from the Debtor-Creditor Section of the Oregon Bar for career service to the Section.  In 1996 he received the Oregon State Bar President’s Award for service to the membership in continuing legal education.  In 1992 he received the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Certificate of Appreciation for his work on the court-annexed mediation program. Commercial law curriculum vitae of Brent G. Summers

In addition to managing his own busy practice, Brent supported Art Tarlow’s business, real estate and construction litigation practice for more than sixteen years.  The opportunity to branch out and learn the construction practice from a seasoned master was among the reasons Brent accepted Art’s offer to go to work with him in early 1994. Before that, Brent worked for ten years and was a partner with Greene & Markley, P.C., a highly successful bankruptcy and creditors’ rights firm in Portland.

OUTSIDE THE FIRM

Brent spends much of his free time with his family.  With his and wife Mary June’s daughters all grown up and working on their own in New York City and Austin Texas.  Brent finds some time for overseas travel, studying his Irish and Scottish heritage, golf, hiking, climbing, river running and skiing.  He also was a founder and served on the Board of the Brian Henninger Foundation for Children’s Charities for 19 years. He served on the Board of Family Stepping Stones Relief Nursery for three years and has actively engaged in fund-raising for numerous charitable groups.  Brent is also known away from law practice as Carl Phillips, the Editor of The Daily Fabarian in Animal House, Universal Studios, 1978.

When there is time to drive to the “back of beyond” as Jim White once called it, Brent has enjoyed kicking back on the family farm in Halfway, Oregon and visiting his Uncle Gordon there.  Brent’s father, Robert S. Summers, was born in a one-bedroom house with no running water, near Halfway in 1933.  From those humble beginnings, Bob excelled at Future Farmers of America, as U.O. Student Body President, at Harvard Law School and on a Fulbright Scholarship overseas.  After a brief stint at law practice in Portland with King, Miller, Anderson, Nash & Yerke, he became a full time law professor in 1960.  In 2011, Bob retired from fifty (50) years of law teaching (42 years at Cornell University and 8 years at the University of Oregon). With Jim White of the University of Michigan, Bob is best known in the United States for their multi-volume treatise on the Uniform Commercial Code. Brent contributed case notes for the treatise for many years.  Until his retirement in 2011, Bob was of counsel to Tarlow, Naito & Summers, LLP, advising the firm on contracts and commercial law issues.  He taught Art Tarlow at the U.O. Law School in old Fenton Hall in 1965. It was in the moot courtroom in the basement of that venerable building that the courtroom scene from Animal House was shot in the Fall of 1977.  Brent (wearing Burt Lancaster’s suit) is in that scene, which ends with Dean Wormer’s (John Vernon’s) famous line: “No more fun of any kind!” And, with a group of other extras, and wearing a completely different costume, Brent gathered in Bob’s old office on the third floor before marching down stairs to the courtroom at the beginning of the scene.