At the 34th annual Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Awards, American Bar Association President Mary Smith quoted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said, “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, but we made it. We made it, all of us.”
“She lifted us all up,” Smith said.
The five women with legal careers spanning private practice, corporate law, law school leadership, nonprofit work and the judiciary received their awards from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession on Aug. 4 at the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago.
The award was established in 1991 to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of female lawyers who have achieved professional excellence within their specialty and paved the way for other women. 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.
Previous award recipients include U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The 2024 Brent honorees are:
Dolores Atencio, visiting scholar at the University of Denver Latinx Center in the Sturm College of Law in Denver, Colorado, said she learned of the importance “of honoring our trailblazers” from the ABA Women’s Commission and that it was the inspiration for her portrait of the first generation of Latina lawyers, the Luminarias de la Ley. The point of “our work,” she said, is “to develop a nation free of discrimination, so that our children, our daughters, may pursue their dreams to the best of their ability.”
Pamila J. Brown, associate judge in the Howard County District Court in Ellicott City, Maryland, recalled her father telling her that she “had to be twice as good to get half the credit,” which “fortified” her determination to do her best. “Our profession is one that is devoted to service and not just merely to gain,” she said, and asked the attendees to “uplift as you climb…that’s part and parcel of what we should be doing each and every day.”
Estelle H. Rogers, retired public interest lawyer of Forestville, California, is a third-generation lawyer who said most of what she knows comes from her mother, a “feisty woman.”She thanked President Smith for elevating “preserving democracy to priority status” during her term and called upon the organized bar to police itself in light of specious election lawsuits and Supreme Court ethics issues. These are “neither partisan nor political,” but “existential” issues, she said.Rogers urged the attendees to “commit yourself” and “step off the sidelines” to help save democracy.
Gina Shishima, chief strategy and operations partner, Norton Rose Fulbright U.S. LLP, Austin, Texas, noted that although she has a Ph.D. in molecular biology, she was reticent to ask for business earlier in her career, even from a friend who worked at a hospital specializing in biotechnology patents -- her exact field. “This reticence to ask for something so essential” is not unique to her, she said. Despite progress made in the field, Shishima quoted a Bloomberg study that projected that an equal number of male and female law partners would not occur until 2181. “Is anyone here comfortable with that?” she asked. “I’m not.” She urged attendees to do what she couldn’t do: ask for business. “Let’s not wait a century and a half.”
Barbara Wall, board member and former chief legal and operating officer of Gannett Co., Inc., in Washington, D.C., recalled working at a New York law firm after graduation. Business was booming and she had plenty of work, but worried about bringing in new clients, since it seemed that business was obtained on golf courses in all-male clubs. After she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1985 to work for Gannett, she went looking for women to add to outside counsel teams and “found lots of them,” and advocated for them to have leadership roles. In the spirit of the Olympics, she asked the audience to light and carry torches for other women.
