Hilarie Bass, co-president of global law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, became president of the American Bar Association (ABA) recently at the conclusion of the annual meeting in New York.
She will serve a one-year term ending in August, 2018.
“During my leadership year, we will focus on the future of the profession: how we educate future lawyers, how we serve our clients and how we provide access to justice,” Bass said.
Bass will concentrate her efforts on the future of legal education, the legal needs of homeless youth both in the United States and worldwide, and the precipitous exodus of experienced female lawyers from the profession.
She also will institute an ABA Legal Fact Check online service to help answer legal questions in the news.
The ABA has created a new 10-member Commission on the Future of Legal Education to help lead the discussion of how the nation educates future lawyers. It will study issues such as the bar exam and passage rates, the length of law school, alternative teaching methods and more.
“The legal profession is confronting significant challenges in legal education,” Bass said. “The ABA is uniquely positioned to work with the important stakeholders to explore possible changes that could transform legal education.”
The Legal Rights of Homeless Youth Initiative will have an international and domestic component.
In the U.S., more than 500,000 homeless children need access to lawyers who can remove the legal barriers that prevent these youth from getting the education, employment, housing, healthcare, identification and other services that could transform their lives.
The ABA project will train volunteer lawyers to provide legal assistance to children in the shelters and match lawyers from across the country with shelters to provide free legal assistance.
Internationally, the ABA will convene a summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil in November with organizations from across the globe to exchange ideas and information on how to best fulfill the obligations laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“The problem of homeless youth cannot be solved overnight, but it must be addressed,” Bass said.
The ABA also will address the problem of women leaving law firms in its Achieving Long-Term Careers for Women in Law initiative.
While women are for the first time this year matriculating at a higher percentage in law schools than men, preliminary research reveals that the most experienced women are leaving the profession in their 40s and 50s.
To gain an understanding about the career dynamics of women lawyers, the ABA is co-sponsoring a research project with the American Bar Foundation on the career trajectories of women lawyers.
In November, the ABA will cosponsor a summit with Harvard Law School examining potential solutions for the long-term retention and advancement of women in law.
“This is a huge loss of talent and expertise to the legal profession and to our justice system that we cannot afford,” Bass said. “We need to understand why so many women lawyers are leaving when their experience is at its peak and they should be reaching the highest levels of leadership positions.”
With ABA Legal Fact Check, the goal is to operate a fact-checking service that focuses on the law and legal matters. The ABA will work with a panel of legal experts to develop dependable answers to legal questions that emerge in the public arena.
Bass serves as co-president and a member of the executive committee for Greenberg Traurig, a multi-practice firm that has more than 2,000 attorneys in 38 offices worldwide.
She previously served an eight-year term as national chair of the firm’s 600-member litigation department. Bass is based in Miami.
Before she was elected president-elect in 2016, Bass began her service to the ABA as a young lawyer and served as chair of the 70,000-member Section of Litigation in 2010-11.
Bass earned her law degree at the University of Miami School of Law and her bachelor’s degree at George Washington University.
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