Attorney, longtime ABA volunteer honored with ABA ethics award
Lucian T. Pera, a Memphis, Tennessee, attorney long active in the American Bar Association, is the 2022 recipient of the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award, one of the top ethics honors of the association. The award honors an individual whose contributions in the professional responsibility field reflect the highest level of dedication to legal professionalism.
Pera, a partner at Adams and Reese LLP, is recognized nationally for his work on ethics in the legal profession as well as media law and transparency issues in government, particularly in Tennessee where he served as president of the Tennessee Open Government Coalition. He has written extensively about ethics and lawyer regulation nationally and for the ABA, including an ethics column for Law Practice, a magazine of the ABA Law Practice Division.
Within the ABA, Pera has served as treasurer, as a member of the House of Delegates, as chair of the Center for Professional Responsibility (CPR) and as an editorial board member of the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, among other positions.
“We refer to Tennessee as the Volunteer state, and Lucian is a modern times example of what that means within the context of significant contributions to the organized bar, our judicial system and the public we serve,” wrote a colleague in support of his nomination.
The award is named in honor of Michael Franck, the late director of the State Bar of Michigan and long-time champion of improvements in lawyer regulation in the public interest.
It will be presented to Pera on June 3, at the National Conference on Professional Responsibility in Baltimore, Maryland.
The CPR Coordinating Council, which consists of the chairs of the committees and commissions that are housed within the center, made the selection.
ABA highlights story of women judges mobilizing to help Afghan counterparts
An article in the February issue of Perspectives, published by the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession, tells the remarkable story of a volunteer coalition of women judges, both in the United States and abroad, who are working tirelessly to rescue Afghan women judges facing violent retribution at the hands of the Taliban.
The story begins with a Zoom call last August between recently retired Judge Patricia Whalen of Vermont and Afghan Judge Anisa Rasooli. Rasooli, a widely respected and fearless jurist who has served on all the major courts in Afghanistan, told her longtime friend Whalen about the Taliban’s eminent retaking of Kabul and the disaster it would bring to Afghan women judges and the protections provided by the law.
When the Taliban reentered Kabul the next day, all of the Afghan women judges immediately lost their jobs and many went into hiding along with their families. Whalen and a core team of half a dozen international judges launched a round-the-clock effort to save their Afghan colleagues, determined to help as many as possible evacuate Afghanistan. The International Association of Women Judges has been at the forefront of leading these rescue efforts. “We just went to work,” Whalen says. “We knew these women. We were their lifeline to the outside world. … It was like jumping into the deep end of a pool and not knowing how to swim.”
“Through this unified global effort, women jurists are demonstrating that devotion and sacrifice are required to preserve just laws and a civil society,” said Perspectives Editorial Board Chair Laura Possessky. “We want to raise greater awareness about their fearless work to aid the women judges of Afghanistan.”
The ABA is responding to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan through the Afghanistan Response Project (www.americanbar.org/content/aba-cms-dotorg/en/advocacy/rule_of_law/afghanistan-response), which includes resources and updates as well as pro bono opportunities for lawyers to assist Afghan refugees.
Expert says tech innovation needed to compete with China
Though the United States has dominated tech innovation for decades, it now faces a competitor in China, according to Gilman Louie, co-founder of technology venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners, and the first CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established with the backing of the CIA. Louie spoke during the American Bar Association National Security Law CLE Conference: Emerging Critical Issues, sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
According to Louie, China is coming close to leading the world in technological advancement.
“China’s timetable is somewhere between 2030 and 2035,” to surpass the U.S. in applied technology innovation, he said. Yet Louie remains optimistic about the future.
“The good news is the U.S. has found itself in these situations in the past,” he said, citing the moon landing following the launch of Sputnik, the American industrial surge during WWII, the rebirth of the auto industry in the 1980s and the development of the internet as examples.
To maintain its competitive edge, the U.S. must remove barriers that slow its ability to innovate, he said.
“We should use government dollars not just to seed great ideas, but to send the message that ‘if you take the risk and you come up with the solution, you can have a market here,’” he said.
Louie also advocates for a more coordinated response to intellectual property theft, saying competitors are leveraging stolen IP.
Louie was a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which released its final report in March 2021, concluding that “Americans have not yet grappled with just how profoundly the AI revolution will impact our economy, national security and welfare.”
Lawyers with a background in national security law can help sort through these complicated issues and create a framework that will withstand the test of the law and eventually, withstand the test of time, Louie said. “I've been fortunate to work with some of the world’s top leading attorneys to work through really tough problems.”
