A portrait of firm founder Alexander Hamilton Sands (Image courtesy Sands Anderson)
Cited as the oldest continuously operating business in Virginia, the law firm Sands Anderson has been a downtown Richmond fixture since before the Civil War. Formerly known as Sands and Sands; Sands, Marks and Miller; Sands, Williams and Lightfoot; and a few other names along the way, it can trace its roots back to an office in the Goddin Building, which was the first structure to be incinerated when the city burned in the last days of the Civil War in 1865.
Over the years, Sands Anderson could be found in different spaces across the city — from the American Building to the Ross to the Fidelity to its current home in the Bank of America Center.
“It’s something that we’re all conscious of, and we all work hard to live up to the history,” says Margaret Hardy, the president of Sands Anderson, which now boasts five additional locations across Virginia and in North Carolina. “I think the reason we’re still here is how we’ve changed and grown and adapted. We honor our past, but we’re looking toward the future.”
Attorney Doug Rucker has been with Sands Anderson since he graduated from law school in 1972. As the firm’s unofficial historian, he has researched its formidable past. “What we do now is different from [the earliest days], but it’s not 180 degrees,” he says. “Back then, everyone was a general practitioner and did all kinds of stuff. There was a lot less law on the books, and most people were doing everything, and not specializing.”
“But the practice of law has changed,” Hardy says. “There was no such thing as billable hours, and I’m sure the relationships with the clients were probably very different.”
Today’s Sands Anderson is like several firms in one, each dealing in a specific area — the government group handles everything from municipal finance to representing school boards, a health care team defends providers across the state, the business group represents startups and established businesses, and litigation lawyers handle everything from mass claims to tax assessment defense.
“Because the issues we deal with are so diverse, we as a practice have to change to react to that,” Hardy says. “Cybersecurity is a new group we’ve started. It’s all about responding to what the needs are in the world where we practice.”
Hanging outside of the Richmond board room of Sands Anderson are portraits of those who have made significant contributions to the firm, the most prominent being founder Alexander Hamilton Sands, who packed a lot of lives into his 59 years: lawyer, author, Baptist minister and moonlighting literary editor, among others.
Born in 1828, Sands attended the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg at the tender age of 10 — so the story goes — when his education was cut short by the death of his father, Thomas, in 1842. He moved to Richmond to work in the the Church Hill law office of his brother William, the clerk of the Superior Court of Law and Chancery in Richmond.
He studied under the tutelage of his brother, and at 21, he earned his license to practice law. Sands was fascinated by the legal world, and he became an authority on chancery law, an equity practice that, as Rucker describes it, concerns civil cases that don’t involve money damages.
Sands likely handled all aspects of the law, as did most lawyers at the time. He also published several books on being a lawyer, including “History of a Suit in Equity” (1854) and “Recreations of a Southern Barrister” (1860). He also edited a newspaper, The Evening Bulletin, and often substituted as editor of the Quarterly Law Review and also the Southern Literary Messenger, which at times featured the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who served as an editor and critic.
While the firm dates its founding to 1842, the year Sands arrived in Richmond at his brother’s practice, it’s probably more accurate to list 1860 as Sands Anderson’s start date. That’s approximately when he and John Howard set up Howard and Sands in the Goddin Building. Sands’ son Conway, who served as a state senator, began practicing with him in 1880, before Sands passed away in 1887.
Margaret Hardy, president of Sands Anderson (Photo courtesy Sands Anderson)
Conway’s brother Alexander joined the then-named Sands and Sands firm after that. A portrait of Alexander Sands, who died in 1967, is among the five watching over the boardroom today. “He came to the offices until he was in his 90s,” Rucker reports. “He was a general practitioner, specialized in trial work. And he was the father of Judge Alexander Sands, who became the judge of the law and equity court, which is now the circuit court.”
The longevity of Sands Anderson can be summed up simply, Rucker adds. “It was a family practice, and you had several generations of that.” For the first hundred years, it was the Sands name that kept the firm going, but as it matured, it was other legal minds who helped it expand.
“I think the reason we’re still here is how we’ve changed and grown and adapted.” —Margaret Hardy, president of Sands Anderson
One of these is A. Scott Anderson, the Anderson in the firm’s name. “He was the former mayor of Richmond [1958-1960], and he primarily defended cases where people were sued for bodily injury,” says Rucker. “He was a popular guy.”
“We have our fingerprints in a lot of things in Richmond,” Hardy says. “Over the years, not just in the practice of law but in the community itself, our attorneys and employees have had a real impact on this area, and I think our other offices are doing the same thing now in their locations.”
Sands Anderson’s expansion in the past 20 years has been deliberate, she says. “When I joined the firm [in the 1990s], it had only one office, in Richmond, and we had fewer than half the attorneys that we have now [63, with 120 employees total]. Since I’ve been here, we’ve expanded to six offices, one of which is in North Carolina. We’ve grown significantly in terms of attorneys and practice areas. We are now more of a full-service law firm than we were historically.”
No descendants of Alexander Sands or Scott Anderson are involved with the firm today. But Rucker says the old-school tradition continues at Sands Anderson. “The way people got clients back then was that they went out into the community and they did things. They served on boards of directors of charities, and people saw they were good lawyers — here, we’ve had mayors, people on City Council, we’ve had presidents of law organizations. Our record speaks for itself.”
