CLC Luncheon from Circuit Media on Vimeo.
Reporting: Allie Winter
By Matt Masich, LAW WEEK COLORADO
DENVER — The Colorado Lawyers Committee at its annual awards luncheon last week at the Marriott City Center honored Morrison & Foerster as its Firm of the Year. The committee, a 32-year-old nonprofit consortium of law firms dedicated to pro bono work, also honored its Homeless ID Task Force as the Task Force of the Year.
John Walsh of Hill & Robbins and nominee for U.S. attorney for Colorado was honored for Outstanding Sustained Contribution, and attorneys Kathleen Gebhardt and Alexander Halpern received the Community Contribution award for their work on the Lobato v. State litigation, a ground-breaking case in educational funding in Colorado.
More than half of the attorneys of top firm Morrison & Foerster’s Denver office participated in six different lawyers committee task forces, taking leadership roles in three. Steve Kaufmann served on the nonprofit’s executive committee and board of directors, and along with Scott Llewellyn co-chaired the Sixth Amendment Task Force, an effort to examine the right to counsel in misdemeanor cases.
MoFo attorneys also wrote an amicus brief in the Colorado Supreme Court Lobato v. State case, Eric Elliff (now with Husch Blackwell Sanders) chaired and three others worked on the Food Stamps Task Force, Yonatan Hagos provided legal information at twice-monthly Legal Night clinics, and worked alongside colleagues at Project Homeless Connect, and other attorneys researched efforts to provide civil legal services for the indigent in the Civil Gideon project.
Kaufmann, who has won lawyers committee awards for individual and sustained contribution in the past, accepted the award for the firm. Kaufmann thanked “Arnold & Porter for setting such a high bar.” Arnold & Porter was firm of the year the last three years.
Dozens aided ID effort
The Homeless ID Task Force won the award for Task Force of the Year. Tim Macdonald of Arnold & Porter accepted the award on behalf of the Homeless ID Task Force — 32 lawyers who volunteered their time last year to help indigent clients get the government identification they need to receive public benefits.
Snell & Wilmer’s Jim Kilroy talked last month about his firm’s involvement in the task force, saying it’s not as easy as it might seem to get a legal name change or birth certificate.
“In some cases we’ve had to proceed to file lawsuits when we’ve had difficulties getting our clients through the administrative process,” he said.
Finally, Denver attorney and author Harry MacLean gave the keynote address, discussing his recent book “The Past is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi’s Struggle for Redemption,” which deals with a former Klansman’s 2007 conviction of murdering two black teens 43 years earlier.
Connie Talmage, executive director of the lawyers committee, and Kenzo Kawanabe of Davis Graham & Stubbs, the committee’s board chair, hosted the ceremon. About 500 attedned, including most of the state’s Supreme Court.
Walsh honored
John Walsh, who had previously been announced as the winner of the Outstanding Sustained Contribution award, was the star of the program. James Scarboro of Arnold & Porter, in a video played before the award presentation, called Walsh “the most relentlessly kindhearted and public-spirited lawyer I know in Denver.”
Walsh has been active in the lawyers committee since 1995, helping lead a number of its projects. Bob Hill, a founding partner of Hill & Robbins, introduced Walsh. “He truly is most deserving of this award,” he said, “not only for his accomplishments, but for the way he went about achieving those accomplishments.”
Walsh, in his acceptance speech, recalled a quote from one of his personal heroes, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. “There is in most Americans some spark of idealism, which can be fanned into a flame,” Walsh quoted. “It takes sometimes a divining rod to find what it is; but when found… the results are often extraordinary.”
The lawyers committee can be that divining rod, Walsh said.
“Use this organization to find your own spark of idealism and put it to good use for the people of Colorado.”
After the awards, Walsh said it was hard for him to single out a particular lawyers committee task force he finds most significant. “It’s the overall impact of dealing with people for whom even the most basic legal process is kind of a mystery and helping them think through and address the problems they face,” he said.
Another important aspect of the lawyers committee, he said, is that “it gives us a way to do that work alongside the very best lawyers in Denver, in Colorado, and for that matter in the United States.” Most cities and states “don’t have an organization that fills that role the way the Colorado Lawyers Committee does.”
Walsh declined to comment on whether he would be able to continue his work with the lawyers committee if he becomes U.S. attorney. •
— Matt Masich, mmasich@circuitmedia.com
