FROM THE SECTION CHAIR OUR 2024 HALL OF FAME INDUCTIONS, INCLUDING OUR TRIAL LAWYER HALL OF FAME 30TH ANNIVERSARY RECEPTION AND EVENT

Written by Erik Silber^*
Chair

The Litigation Section is honored each year to induct attorneys who have had an exemplary career into its Trial Lawyer, Appellate Lawyer, and Alternative Dispute Resolution Halls of Fame. The ADR Hall of Fame is the newest of our inductions recognizing career achievement and will be selected later this year (previous winners were Carrie Menkel-Meadow (2023), Jim Madison (2022), and Richard Chernick (2021)). I want to focus on the other two for a moment, and the events honoring those inductees.

The Litigation Section, particularly our Committee on Appellate Courts, just selected this year’s inductee into the Appellate Lawyer Hall of Fame, the seventh person to receive that honor, following Richard Benes (2023), Hal Cohen (2022), Wendy Lascher (2021), Dennis Riordan (2020), Jon Eisenberg (2019), and Ellis Horvitz (2018). This year, we are honored to induct Margaret Grignon. Justice Grignon served as a justice on the California Court of Appeal for 14 years (Second District, Division Five), authoring more than 2,200 opinions. She left the bench in 2005 to lead the Los Angeles appellate practice at Reed Smith. After a decade there, in 2015, she established the Grignon Law Firm, with her daughter Anne, focusing on appellate law and trial consultation. Justice Grignon is a past president of the California Academy of Appellate Lawyers and a fellow and former board member of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. Justice Grignon has had a distinguished career as an appellate justice and lawyer and the Litigation Section, and our Committee on Appellate Courts, are excited to honor her by inducting her into the Appellate Lawyer Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony will take place on April 25 during one of the Litigation Section’s signature events, the Litigation and Appellate Summit, in Long Beach . That two-day Summit (April 25 and 26) will also feature Supreme Court Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, Supreme Court Justice Martin Jenkins, U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada, and multiple Court of Appeal justices, among the many presenters and panelists. It is worth attending the event just to honor Justice Grignon, but there will be other great trial and appellate programs (including, in a first for the Summit, a live podcast of appellate attorney M.C. Sungaila’s "The Portia Project").

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