Law Practice
Jul. 12, 2000
Californians Win Many Prizes At Annual Meeting of the ABA
NEW YORK - The American Bar Association will have awarded more than 70 prizes and honors by the time its annual meeting is over, and this year, many of those awards will come home to California.
Perhaps more impressive is that two Southern California lawyers and a Northern California law firm received three of the five Pro Bono Publico Awards that the ABA's Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service gave out Monday. Anil Mehta of Buena Park received the award for having donated nearly 2,000 hours of work on 50 different matters to Orange County's Public Law Center last year.
Charles E. Patterson, a commercial litigator at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in Los Angeles, received his honor for three years of post-conviction work on behalf of Manuel Babbitt, a mentally ill Vietnam veteran on death row for the 1980 murder and attempted rape of a 78-year-old Sacramento woman. Patterson put in more than 3,000 pro bono hours on the case, including 800 hours last year, but Babbitt was executed on May 4, 1999.
Finally, San Francisco's Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe received the award for its long and deep commitment to pro bono work, dating back to its founding in 1890. It has aided poor clients in matters involving civil rights, immigration, environmental issues, hate crimes, prisoners' rights, real estate and taxes, and it has included legal services lawyers in its in-house training programs. The Bar Association of San Francisco and the county bar associations in Los Angeles, Santa Clara and King counties nominated it for the award.
The other winners of the pro bono award this year were the University of Pennsylvania Law School for being the first law school to require students to do some public service work and the legal department of Exxon Co. for its long history of aiding the poor in Houston.
Also winning one of the ABA's major honors was the Alameda County Bar Association, which received one of the two Harrison Tweed awards handed out this year. The award, which recognizes achievement in preserving and increasing access to legal services for the poor, is given jointly by the ABA's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.
The groups honored the Alameda bar for stepping into the breach when legal aid programs in the Bay Area were forced to consolidate and for helping to develop a new legal services delivery program. The ABA said the bar association also built consensus and improved coordination among the 30 aid groups in the area.
The Delaware State Bar Association won the second Harrison Tweed Award for working with three legal aid groups to launch a combined statewide fund-raising campaign for the programs.
Los Angeles lawyer Shirley M. Hufstedler was honored Sunday with a Margaret Brent Award given by the ABA Commission on Women. Hufstedler, the chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, is a former judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and served as secretary of education under President Jimmy Carter. She won the ABA Medal, the association's highest honor, in 1995.
Also receiving a Margaret Brent Award on Sunday were Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye, New York products liability lawyer Sheila L. Birnbaum and Dovey J. Roundtree, the general counsel of the National Council of Negro Women.
Mary Lou Breslin and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund jointly won the Paul G. Hearne Award for Disability Rights. The 2 -year-old award, bestowed by the ABA Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law, was handed out Monday.
Since its beginning in 1979, the fund, based in the Bay Area, has become the leading national law and policy center dealing with the rights of the disabled. It has worked to enact legislation such as the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Restoration Act, and it has trained more than 45,000 people in the ADA since the act took effect in 1990. Breslin, a co-founder of the fund, has served as its deputy and executive director, as well as its president and board chair.
Other Californians won ABA awards :
* The Mobile Self-Help Legal Access Center of the Ventura County Superior Court received a "meritorious recognition" from the Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services.
* The Los Angeles Times won an honorable mention in the ABA's media awards for its story "A Legal Way Out" by Barry Siegel.
* University of San Diego School of Law student Brian Derdowski took home the third prize in the ABA Business Law Section's student writing contest.
Don De Benedictis
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