You know that television show JAG? That “adventure drama about an elite wing of officers trained as lawyers who investigate, prosecute and defend those accused of crimes in the military, including murder, treason and terrorism”? You know, the one populated by dashing young attorneys? Mark Foster was one of those guys.

It was a different time when the president and CEO of Stinson, Mag & Fizzell studied public administration at the University of Missouri in the late ‘60s. There was a little war going on in Vietnam, and Foster signed up for the reserves to hold the draft at bay. In return, he promised to serve his country after he completed law school at Duke University, class of 1973.

His future law firm actually recruited him while he was still at Duke, but he no sooner got back to Missouri than his country called to collect on its debt. Within six months, he found himself serving a three-year tour in the JAG Corps, stationed at Pearl Harbor.

“I loved it,” he says of his life in Hawaii with the high-school sweetheart he had married. “Every day was a holiday there.” And, he says, the job taught him trial work.

He returned to Missouri and to Stinson Mag in February of 1977 and has been there ever since. “It’s like one day I woke up,” Foster says, “and it was 25 years later.”

But of the busy 25 years that have passed, the last one has been one of the busiest. It was about a year ago that Foster and Brian Gardner, managing partner of Morrison & Hecker, started talking in earnest about merging their two firms. And now the two are about to join to create the second-largest law firm in Kansas City. All that’s left to work out is how to pick a name and how to physically combine two firms that each occupies 100,000 square feet of office space.

Despite the long, hard days of planning, Foster has no doubt the merger will be successful. And if it’s not, he’s still a member of the bar in Hawaii.

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