Philadelphian spearheads national LGBT attorney group

The American Bar Association’s LGBT Litigator Committee launched nearly a year ago, and the national attorneys’ group is expecting continued growth and development as it gains prominence in both the LGBT and mainstream legal communities.

Abbe Fletman, a shareholder at Philadelphia’s Flaster Greenberg, suggested the idea for what would be the first-ever ABA committee geared toward LGBT attorneys to her fellow members of the ABA’s Section of Litigation in 2008.

“The Section has 75,000 members around the country but there was no group dealing with the legal issues of LGBT people or with the issues within the profession that LGBT lawyers face,” Fletman said. “So I got together with a number of other LGBT people within the Section leadership and also some straight people who were supportive of creating such a committee and we just put our plans into action.”

In the past year, the committee took its important first organizational steps, electing co-chairs — Laura Brill from Los Angeles and David Tsai from San Francisco — and launching its Web site.

The group hosted its first program at a recent Section leadership meeting, an event that featured a panel discussion with a Lambda Legal attorney and an LGBT reporter, who addressed the myriad LGBT legal advancements and setbacks over the past year. The committee will host its next program, a forum on LGBT adoption, this weekend during the ABA’s mid-year meeting.

Fletman said that while the committee helps keep its members abreast of the legal issues impacting the LGBT community, it also provides a support system for LGBT attorneys and can help them to work toward implementation of LGBT-inclusive policies at their respective firms, an issue Brill addressed during the discussion at the leadership meeting.

“Part of our mission is to promote policies that will enhance the full participation of LGBT people in the legal field,” Fletman said. “The committee certainly offers a great opportunity to network and even the potential for referring one another business, but it also helps get people interested and energized in working not only on LGBT legal issues but also the very-important integration issues.”

Fletman, who is the co-director of the ABA division that oversees the LGBT Litigator Committee, said the committee spent the past year cutting through all the red tape needed to set up the group, adding the ABA has been “extremely supportive” of the committee’s creation.

This year the group, which now has several-dozen members from throughout the country, plans to create subcommittees and organize more programming for ABA events. Fletman said there are also plans to launch a joint newsletter with the National LGBT Bar Association and host a continuing-legal-education teleconference after the verdict in the federal suit in California that’s challenging Proposition 8.

For more information on the committee and to learn how to join, visit www.abanet.org.

Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].

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