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Atlanta Bar Association’s Leadership Luncheon April 14, 2016 Piedmont Driving Club |
Thank you, Michael. Unless perhaps you are Donald Trump, it is hard to listen to someone overstate your virtues, but thank you for believing at least some of what you just shared. Thank you for making my job so easy and so much fun. And please know that I learn as much from you as you claim you do from me. For example, because of you, I know the difference between Run The Jewels and Run DMC, and between Killer Mike and Mike Tyson. Thank you for pumping up my street creds! You are a great lawyer and a great friend.
Rick Deane, it is an honor to share the day with you. Congratulations on all that you and your firm have accomplished, and I thank you for joining with Walt Davis and Ashley Heintz and Ken Smith and others who make Jones Day and Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation such a strong partnership.
I had the great fortune to be a teenager in the 1960s, when issues of social justice dominated the conversations of our lives and framed my thoughts about how I wanted to be in the world. It was natural therefore, that after I read to Kill a Mockingbird, I wanted to be Atticus Finch. Never mind that my neighborhood was the city of Baltimore, hardly rural or particularly Southern; never mind that my neighbors were more likely to be named Jacob and Sarah than Jem and Scout. And never mind that by the time I went to law school American society had evolved enough that 20% of my class looked like Tom Robinson. I wanted to be Atticus Finch because I believed that the law, applied by people of integrity, could make magic happen. Well, more than 50 years and one additional book later, I may have been wrong about Atticus, but I was right about the law: for those of commitment and courage, the profession still presents opportunities for the expression of dignity, integrity and, yes, nobility and heroism.
I share everyone’s frustrations with the limitations of the legal system. But look where I work: every week I hear another story of a volunteer lawyer representing someone, who otherwise had no shot at a lawyer, who wins. Wins their safety, or a chance at habitable conditions, wins the recovery of wages due them for their work. Our clients have usually lost, and have no real certainty that the justice system will give them an even shot, but every week – really, every day – I hear about another circumstance of the recovery of hope and their dignity through the help of a pro bono lawyer. Rid yourself of the lie that magic is dead – if those stories are not magic, then maybe the dictionary needs to be revised.
That said, if magic is defined as the explanation of last resort, then this is not really magic. The fact that this happens is because of a lot of really good work by very smart, very committed people, who know that the best way to create magic is to do something wonderful for someone else. The AVLF staff – Michael, Carey, Jon, Matilde, Kenisha, Lilli, Jamie, Nilu, Cole, Libby, Katie, Camille, and Elizabeth (whom we love to claim as AVLF staff!) – are creative, playful, passionate and very talented, and I respect and appreciate you all enormously. And so does this community, and I ask you to join me in thanking the wonderful people who are the reason for AVLF’s success.
There are two other groups in the room of whom I want to make special note. I travel a fair amount among the providers of free legal service in this country, and I’ve have never even heard of, much less come across, a Bar Association that accomplishes for the pro bono community what this one does. Atlanta Bar staff, you are consistently excellent and manage, somehow, always to be pleasant even at 7:30 three mornings in a row. Carla, you have the LRIS running at a very high level, and we love working closely with you. Terri, you are so good at your job, and you have been a gift to this community. And Harold Franklin, we’ve never had a Bar President more supportive of AVLF – thank you for always asking what the Atlanta Bar can do for AVLF. Jim Blitch, you are a very good and smart man, but you will have your hands full reaching up for Harold’s bar.
And especially as this is a Leadership Luncheon, let me take a moment and tell you about the groups that lead me, the Boards of Directors of the AVLF. Surely THEY make magic happen – how else to explain that we have 400-600 volunteer lawyers serving more than 4,000 clients every year? That we have five gorgeous events every year that helped generate $2,100,000 in the last three years from private lawyers, corporate divisions and corporations? You give of your time and your talent, and the entire community benefits because you believe in equal access to justice.
I have mentioned that I am from Baltimore – I moved here in 1976. Baltimore is a beautiful city, and a very tough city. But mean streets or otherwise, I still considered it home. I had a house here and a job here and extraordinary children here, but Atlanta never felt like my home…until I took this job. When I started working with AVLF and became engaged with the smart, compassionate, dedicated and even loving people who make up this community, my sense of this city, and my place in it changed. And now, wherever I am and someone asks, “So where’s home?” my visceral response is Atlanta. And it is part of what pushes me: this city is not just a place I drive through on my way to work or the Braves game- it is my home, and I will have something to say about what happens in my house.
And I know you feel that way, and that so many of you support AVLF for the same sense of commitment to a community. A community that knows that, in FDR’s words, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Two notes: I am very happy that Scott Loveless, my college roommate and lifelong great friend, is here today. Scott just retired as the Director of Consulting & Predictive Sciences at DuPont. Perhaps amazingly, for a world-renowned scientist, a man who ran the Haskell Laboratory and who speaks immuno-toxicology, he has always been among the most playful and world-aware people I know. Scott, I thank you for many things, including the fact that 46 years ago I passed, barely, freshman math class. The barely part was me – the I passed part was you.
And I end today where every day of my life begins, with love and appreciation for Wendy. Years ago, I began to come home from work dispirited and miserable pretty much every day. Wendy looked at me one day at said “Would you please quit and find something you love to do and can be passionate about?” And here I am, proud to work among the open-minded, the generous, the ethical and the judicious, those whose work would make Mr. Finch, “the bravest man who ever lived,” proud. I know I am.