Mark Standen

Mark has been practicing law for thirty-three years, focusing almost exclusively on estate planning and estate and trust administration. Following a one-year clerkship with Associate Justice Robert Clifford of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Mark’s first eighteen years of private law practice were spent in Portland at one of Maine’s largest law firms, where he rose through the ranks to become the chair of the wills, trusts and estates practice group. In 2006 he began his own law practice in Yarmouth with an abiding belief that most people would rather have their personal legal needs met in an intimate village setting where neither parking garages nor elevators are required.

Over the years, Mark has provided a diverse mix of clients with responsive guidance in the design and implementation of their wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, special needs trusts, durable powers of attorney, health care directives, premarital agreements, and the like. He counsels individuals with respect to estate and gift taxation, asset preservation, elder law issues, and succession planning for legacy real estate and business enterprises. His work also includes advising fiduciaries in the administration of estates and trusts and occasionally serving as a fiduciary himself when the circumstances recommend that course.

Mark’s first career was as a high school English teacher and coach. As a lawyer, he finds his teaching background to be helpful in communicating esoteric legal principles to clients in plain-spoken and accessible terms. He has also had the opportunity to rediscover teaching in a more formal setting as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maine School of Law. He has taught the Estate Planning course to third-year law students and the Estate and Gift Tax course, also to third-year students, in academic years 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15. He is a member of the Maine State Bar Association, the American Bar Association, and the Maine Estate Planning Council.

Mark and his wife Elizabeth have lived in Freeport since 1982. They have three children, all in their 30s, and three grandchildren. For the past 15 years Mark and Elizabeth have served as Executive Directors of the George & Raymond Frank Foundation, a Maine charity that operates a traditional summer camp in Weld, Maine, where they host about 200 boys each summer from across the U.S. and abroad.