SEAN MARTIN

SEAN Martin is the chief legal officer and general counsel for Generate Biomedicines in Somerville, Massachusetts. He oversees all legal and compliance matters. He brings broad business leadership and extensive healthcare experience, including intellectual property creation and expansion, corporate partnerships and transactions, and crucial legal, ethics, and compliance matters.

Before joining Generate, Martin was general counsel and senior vice president at the leading healthcare company Baxter International Inc. He successfully oversaw the legal, compliance, and government affairs for several key projects, including the largest acquisition in Baxter’s

history, Hillrom, Inc.

Earlier in his career, Martin served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago for eight years, prosecuting federal criminal cases.

Martin earned an AB in history, summa cum laude, from the University of Michigan, and a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

Martin and his wife Heather, also an attorney, have three children. He is a fifth generation Irish attorney. His great great grandfather James McMahon Graham (1852-1945) immigrated to Springfield, Illinois from Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan in 1868 at the age of 15. He attended the University of Illinois and became a founding attorney at Shutt, Graham & Lester in Springfield. He also served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1909-1915.

Martin’s great grandfather, Hugh Joseph Graham, Sr. attended the University of Illinois and became an attorney, ultimately founding the law firm of Graham & Graham in Springfield which still exists today in the same office where it was founded.

His grandmother, Elizabeth A. Graham, graduated from Smith College (1935) and the Lincoln College of Law School in Springfield, in 1952; she worked as an attorney at Northwestern University and subsequently a public school teacher as director of art, and moved to Ireland in 1982 to a farm outside Cahersiveen on the Ring of Kerry, where she worked as an artist.

Martin’s paternal grandfather, James B. Martin, married to Elizabeth, was also an attorney in private practice in Springfield; his maternal grandfather, Walter Mirek, was an attorney in civic and private practice in Chicago.

Martin’s father and fellow Irish Legal 100 member Kevin co-founded Swanson, Martin & Bell in 1992, which maintains offices in three states.

When at home, Martin works at his great great grandfather’s law desk, which James McMahon Graham purchased from the law firm of Lincoln & Herndon (as in, Abraham Lincoln, a notable Illinois attorney), a small firm which shared office space with the Shutt, Graham & Lester law firm in Springfield.

“Family lore has it that, of course, it must have been Abe’s law desk at one point. The desk has been dutifully restored and passed down through the generations,” Martin says.

The oldest two of Martin’s children will be applying to law school next year. It is anticipated that one will inherit the desk as the sixth generation Irish attorney.