Geoffrey J Ayers

Geoff was born and raised in Williamsport, and decided he wanted to be a trial lawyer when a local county judge explained the legal system to his kindergarten class at St. Anne’s Elementary School. He is a member of Loyalsock Township High School’s class of 1984. He earned his undergraduate degree at the College of William & Mary, where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, participated on the varsity debate team, and graduated in 1988 with a degree in Economics. He attended law school in Washington, D.C., at the American University’s Washington College of Law, where he served as a Dean’s Fellow for two professors in his second the third years (assisting in the drafting of two legal text books); secured the reversal of a life sentence in a felony murder case tried in the Maryland state courts; and graduated in the top five present of his class.

Geoff’s roots with the Rieders Travis Law Firm can be traced back to the early 1980’s when he was fortunate enough to befriend Ronald C. Travis on a tennis court at the Williamsport Tennis Club. Mr. Travis introduced Geoff to the law firm’s attorneys and staff, and Geoff worked at the firm part-time for a number of summers through high school, college, and law school. Mr. Travis ultimately sponsored Geoff for his subsequent bar memberships.

Upon graduating from law school in 1991, Geoff served as a term law clerk for the Hon. Malcolm Muir in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. At the conclusion of that two-year term, Geoff was the first Assistant Counsel hired to serve in the Williamsport office of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Resources (which later became the Department of Environmental Protection). In 1999 Geoff accepted Judge Muir’s invitation to return as one of his two permanent law clerks. In 2010, after Judge Muir reduced his caseload to the point that he required the services of only one permanent law clerk, Geoff returned to the Department of Environmental Protection and served as the Regional Counsel (supervising attorney) in the Department’s Williamsport office for approximately thirteen years.

Geoff retired from Commonwealth service and returned to the Rieders Travis Law firm in 2025.