Bar association head leads 'big tent'.

By Judy Harrison, Bangor Daily News, Maine Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Jan. 31--BANGOR, Maine -- In a state where most lawyers consider themselves to be general practitioners, the career path of the new president of the Maine State Bar Association is full of twists and turns. Meris J. Bickford, 52, is a vice president at Merrill Merchants Bank in Bangor, where she is a bank trust administrator.

For 20 years, however, Bickford worked in the child welfare field, first in the Maine Attorney General's Office and later as the director of Child and Family Services at the Department of Human Services.

"As MSBA president," she said, "one of the primary things I do is create an identity and a voice for a pretty broad constituency of lawyers. ... We create an identity at the Legislature and in the public. We try to be the voice of the practitioner in Maine, even though our members include criminal defense attorneys and prosecutors as well as people who represent insurance companies and those who seek recovery from them."

Bickford was elected president of the 3,200-member organization earlier this month at its annual meeting in Rockport after serving one year as president-elect. She has served for 11 years on the bar association's board of governors and was the first public sector lawyer elected to the board.

Born in Bar Harbor, she attended 20 schools before she graduated from high school.

"I was raised by a band of gypsies," she joked on Friday. "Dad was in the [Maine] Forest Service, and we moved from fire tower to fire tower."