Kevin Shepherd
Treasurer (2022)
Partner with Venable in Baltimore.
University of Baltimore School of Law, J.D. (1984)
Kevin has been a member of the Board of Governors since 2016. Chair of the Finance Committee and member of the Executive Committee. Liaison to the Task Force on Gatekeeper Regulation and the Profession, serving as its 2010-2015 chair. Member of the House of Delegates since 2011. Chair of the Section of Real Property, Trust and Estate Law (2005-2006). President of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers in 2010. Member of the Anglo-American Real Property Institute. Reason to serve: “My financial background. I am the chair of the finance committee at Venable, and I have chaired that committee for the past 20 years. I think I can bring that experience and expertise to bear on the challenges facing the ABA in the financial arena. Plus, in addition to that, I feel very strongly that the ABA needs to maintain its primacy in advocating for an independent judiciary and maintain the rule of law. We need to do that, and to do that, you need to be financially strong. I am rather passionate about that.”
Plans for term: “I want a couple of things. I want to focus on the efforts to make the new membership model a success. We need to grow dues revenue and that’s one vehicle to do that. The other thing, I think we need to be more strategic in our budgeting process and perhaps work toward a multiyear budgeting process. That’s down the road. That’s long term.”
Positive experience with the ABA: “Can I say more than one? One is the ability to work with a group of immensely talented lawyers from around the country, from different geographic areas, different practice disciplines, different backgrounds. It’s so incredibly enriching to work with them on a daily basis. A second thing, I think from a policy perspective, is our efforts to address the gatekeeper-related issues dealing with what is the role of a lawyer in detecting and combatting money laundering. The way we have proactively tried to address that in the U.S. legal profession, both from a regulatory and a legislative standpoint, and also domestically and internationally. It’s been a very enriching experience to deal with a lot of stakeholders in that process—governmental officials, other bar associations around the world—it’s been quite an experience.”