Thomas Colin is one of Connecticut's leading divorce attorneys, well established now on the team of top-flight trial lawyers of Schoonmaker, George, Colin & Blomberg of Greenwich. He recently returned to the firm after a 6-year term as a judge in the state's family courts. There's a calm, authoritative bearing about the 52-year-old Long Island native, which has translated into ongoing success in upscale Fairfield County, and that's earned him the respect not simply of his immediate colleagues - Cynthia Coulter George and Lisa Blomberg, among others -- but competitors as well. He graduated at the top of his class, and accepted a full scholarship to St. John's University School of Law, all the while bartending at yacht clubs, night clubs and at such establishments as The Cork n' Board restaurant of Malverne, Long Island. "You'd be surprised" how such work prepared him for family law, he says today. "It's all about being a common-sense listener." Colin spent a year as a law clerk with a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine before joining Cummings & Lockwood in Stamford; "the idea of a close-to-home suburban firm appealed to me," he says. There he joined the late Sam Schoonmaker in the firm's litigation practice, and the young lawyer immediately stood out among dozens of associates Schoonmaker had recruited over the years. "A good courtroom lawyer must be aggressive and hungry," Schoonmaker told us in 2009. "Tom was just that. He earned everything he got." For his part, Colin was handed divorce cases early on - "I got to go to court right away, so I loved it." When Schoonmaker and George in 1996 pulled up stakes and launched their boutique firm, Colin was their top draft pick. In short order Colin was a name partner of the firm, which today has ten attorneys.

In 2012 Colin was recruited to serve as a Connecticut Family Court judge; just this year he elected to return to private practice.

Today Colin - imperturbable and remarkably detached from the super-emotions of his cases -- handles some of the most contentious custody matters in the state. Colin's office is adorned with gifts from grateful clients, including an elaborate and colorful 3-D cutout of courtroom scenes. A career milestone for Colin was an extremely contentious 2007 case, a bitter custody trial that lasted 86 days, then reportedly a U.S. record for custody cases. Colin's client prevailed.