1964

A Wah Hoo Wah for Mike Bender. Mike, a criminal defense lawyer in Denver I and a partner in Bender and Treece, recently received the highest and most prestigious national award given by the National Association of Defense Lawyers, the Robert C. Henney award. In addition, Mike is just beginning a year-long term as chairman of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association.

These accolades appear to reflect a culmination of years of successful work by Mike both in private practice and in the public arena. After graduating from the University of Colorado law school, Mike worked for years as a deputy state public defender, as well as with the public defender's office in Denver and Jefferson County. Staying in the public arena, Mike then worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After a few years of private practice in California Mike returned to Denver to private criminal practice, supplementing this work with a part-time faculty position at the University of Denver law school. Mike has been very active in the NADL on a national level, including being co-chair of the Strike Force and being on the long Range Planning Committee. Mike's family, consists of his wife, Helen, a practicing clinical psychologist, and five children ranging from a seven year old to a sophomore at Stanford. They enjoy bicycling and skiing together. Mike says he is "blessed and fortunate for his full, but not peaceful, life."

I recently spoke to Walt Smith. Walt is the head resident partner in the Adanta office of Lord Bissell & Brooks, a nationally renowned law firm with offices in Chicago and los Angeles, as well as Adanta. Walt is involved in a fascinating litigation practice with emphasis on railroad litigation and other general commercial and product liability litigation, and he is involved in insurance coverage-related matters areas related to the litigation. Walt is also very much involved with litigation stemming from the FDIC's claims arising out of the alleged wrongdoing by individuals re ated to financial institutions in the S&L and related problems.

Walt insightfully sees much of this litigation, including environmental litigation and other large scale product liability litigation, as an attempt to resolve expensive societal structural and other social problems without going through the political process of solving them and then paying for them. This results in private expensive litigation against msurance companies and financial institutions to pay for problems which were never anticipated, paid for, nor solved politically. He is concerned that major insurance and financial institutions could be threatened because of this.

After Dartmouth and Harvard Law, Walt prepared for practice by working for the Judge Advocate General Corp., where he was mioally stationed in Saigon during the TET offensive. He was involved in the foreign claims commission. In 1971 Walt joined Pentagon, where he worked on tort litigation and claims. Following the service, Walt worked in the general counsel's office at Amtrak before going into private practice. For years he worked in the Chicago office of this firm as a partner, until he used his persuasive power to talk them into opening up an Atlanta office near his home town, Macon. Walt married in 1970 and has two children, Rush 15 and Berkeley 13. When he is not busy at home or at the office, you can find him and his family rafting or canoeing down the cool rivers or hiking. I'm sure he d be pleased to hear from you.

Walt told me that he is pleased with the growing diversity and changes which appear to be happening at Dartmouth, though he is concerned with what appear to be permanent distractions with old issues.

Keep the news coming.

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