RSRM Celebrates 100 Years!

Rollins, Smalkin, Richards & Mackie, L.L.C., celebrates its centennial anniversary as a law firm in 2019.

The Firm, originally established in 1919 in Baltimore, Maryland, was founded by H. Beale Rollins. Mr. Rollins was born in Baltimore in 1898 and after being orphaned at ten years of age, he attended the McDonogh school in 1909 on a full scholarship, from which he graduated in 1915 as valedictorian. He then enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Law and earned his Juris Doctor at the age of twenty. A year later, Mr. Rollins opened this Firm, originally under the name of “Law Offices of H. Beale Rollins.”

Thereafter, three attorneys (Samuel S. Smalkin, F. Gray Goudy and T. Benjamin Weston) joined Mr. Rollins’ practice focusing on insurance defense work, and following World War II, the Firm changed its name to “Rollins, Smalkin, Goudy & Weston.”  In the 1950s, following Mr. Goudy’s departure and the addition of two new attorneys, Raymond Richards and Thomas G. Andrew, the Firm became known as “Rollins, Smalkin, Weston & Andrew.” Over the next two decades, the Firm saw the departure and addition of several attorneys, including Edward Mackie, and continued to focus its practice on insurance work. Following Mr. Andrew’s death in 1973, the Firm changed its name to “Rollins, Smalkin, Weston, Richards & Mackie,” and in 1980, after Mr. Weston’s death, the Firm became known by the name it still carries today: Rollins, Smalkin, Richards & Mackie.

In the last nearly 40 years, the Firm has expanded its size and expanded its practice areas to include general litigation, insurance defense, insurance coverage, workers’ compensation, construction litigation, premises liability, toxic torts, transportation litigation, products liability, and medical malpractice. Today, it is one of the oldest, continually-operating mid-sized firms in the State of Maryland.

For more than 50 years, the Firm was located in the Title Building at Lexington and St. Paul Streets in Baltimore. In 1984, the Firm acquired and restored a historic four-story building at 401 North Charles Street, which it continues to occupy today. This Spring, the Firm will move to the First National Bank Building by the Baltimore Inner Harbor.