CHICAGO, July 17, 2018 – Eileen Letts, a partner and civil trial lawyer at Zuber Lawler & Del Duca LLP in Chicago, is a recipient of the American Bar Association’s 2018 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.
Letts will receive the award, given annually by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, on Sunday, Aug. 5, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago during the ABA Annual Meeting. In addition to Letts, the 2018 award recipients include Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, Cynthia E. Nance, Tina M. Tchen and Patricia Gillette.
“We are honored to recognize this spectacular group of women,” said Stephanie Scharf, chair of the ABA Commission. “We applaud their achievements, knowing that their efforts will inspire a new generation of women lawyers.” Previous honorees include U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After earning her bachelor’s degree at The Ohio State University and juris doctorate from Chicago-Kent College of Law, Letts served as assistant corporate counsel for the city of Chicago and as a staff attorney on the Chicago Housing Authority. She has been a partner in several law firms, including 26 years at the firm she co-founded, Greene and Letts. She serves on the ABA Advisory Council for the presidential initiative, Achieving Long-Term Careers for Women in Law, and co-chairs the ABA Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
In 2015, Letts was asked to co-chair then-ABA president Paulette Brown’s Diversity & Inclusion 360 Commission and was asked to examine the state of the profession as it pertained to diversity and inclusion and create a plan to solve the issues they discovered. Letts led the Commission to develop training videos on implicit bias, pass policies on diversity and create the National Pipeline Diversity Initiatives Directory, a platform built to help students achieve their dreams of a career in law.
The ABA Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, established in 1991, honors outstanding women lawyers who have achieved professional excellence in their area of specialty and have actively paved the way to success for others. The award is named for Margaret Brent, the first woman lawyer in America. Brent arrived in the colonies in 1638, and was involved in 124 court cases in more than eight years, winning every case.
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