Jim Peterson

Jim Peterson was an English major at Yale College, and holds a law degree from the Yale Law School. His first ten years of practice were in the litigation department of a Wall Street law firm, with a concentration in the representation of the large accounting firms. That led to 19 years in the in-house legal group of the Arthur Andersen firm, first in Chicago and later in Paris -- where he lived with his family for seven years, and where he and his wife Kat continue to divide their time.

Before all that, as a first-year lawyer in New York, age 28 in 1973, he was the junior member on the legal team representing Kate Rothko, as she became the lead plaintiff in the complex legal proceedings involving her late father’s estate. That assignment dominated his time and energy through the extended trial, multiple appeals, and the proceedings by which the bulk of the paintings held by Rothko at his death were secured and retrieved from their threatened disappearance from public view.

He is one of the few first-hand participants in that adventure, still living to tell the story.