Morris Hirsch Receives Business Law Section’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Mark Moore

Morris Hirsch

Since 1977, the State Bar of California Business Law Section (BLS) has given its Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize the lawyer who "over an extended period has made significant contributions to the Section or to business law generally in the State of California and who has achieved high status in the legal community." We are pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2015 BLS Lifetime Achievement Award is Morris W. Hirsch.

Morris is a third-generation native of the San Francisco Area and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977 with a major in English Literature. "The plan was to get an advanced degree and be an English Professor, but I was told that these jobs were few and far between," Morris tells us. Looking back, this may have been a lucky turn of events for all of us, since Morris’s "Plan B" was to go to law school. That he did, receiving his J.D. cum laude from Harvard in 1980. He came back to California and joined then Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro as a young associate, where he specialized in commercial transactions and bankruptcy/debt restructuring. Morris was made partner in 1988, but that gets a little ahead of our story. Even as an associate, Morris had started to make a difference in the practice of law in California.