First runner-up Jon Bauer (from left), Attorney of the Year Dana Bucin and second runner-up Moy Ogilvie at the 2019 Connecticut Professional Excellence Awards held May 16 in Hartford. (Photo: Photo: Gary Lewis)

The Connecticut Law Tribune has named Murtha Cullina partner Dana Bucin Connecticut's 2019 Attorney of the Year.

The award was presented Thursday night at Hartford's Bond Ballroom, along with awards for first runner-up Jon Bauer, director of University of Connecticut School of Law's Asylum and Human Rights Clinic, and second runner-up Moy Ogilvie, managing partner at McCarter & English in Hartford.

As the winners gathered to accept their awards, Bucin said she was surprised and honored to be chosen for this year's award. She thanked her fellow honorees, family members and colleagues for their encouragement and support.

“My law firm has been incredibly supportive in a time when my practice has turned from being the usual business immigration lawyer to pretty much being a civil rights lawyer in tough times such as these,” Bucin said. “To give you an example of how supportive they are, 20 lawyers and staff members at Murtha Cullina have offered to assist me with bond hearings for detained clients.”

A Romanian American and former winner of the Tribune's New Leader in the Law and High Achiever awards, Bucin helped secure the release of two Cuban nationals from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last year and has given critical help to clients from around the world in gaining legal immigration status. Last year, she was appointed to serve as honorary consul of Romania to Connecticut, and she has focused a significant amount of her work on helping Romanian American business owners get established.

Bucin gave special thanks to her husband, fellow attorney Erick Ignacio Diaz and their three children for their strong support when cases have required her to travel. “[Erick] is the reason I can just take off and go to JFK airport during the travel ban and assist a refugee client with her three kids coming here from a Muslim country,” she said.

“I want to thank all the immigration lawyers in the room, including Maria de Castro Foden and Jon Bauer, who are doing tremendous work,” Bucin added. “It's not easy to be an immigration lawyer, because it's fighting hard in the trenches and in immigration courts across the country and visiting clients in detention centers, and that takes its emotional toll on you.”

Second runner-up Moy Ogilvie, promoted to managing partner in McCarter & English's Hartford office, said she was honored to be recognized alongside Bucin, with whom she worked early in Bucin's career. “I am so proud of you and all that you have done,” she said. Ogilvie also thanked the firm that got her legal career started, Cummings and Lockwood, where she started as a summer intern.

To manage a law firm is something that I would never have aspired to do, and it's been an interesting life in year one,” Ogilvie said, adding that members at McCarter and English have supported her vision of outreach, diversity and inclusion. “I am so grateful that my firm understands the need for me to give back and leave the door open for others,” she said.

Ogilvie won a New Leader in the Law-Impact Award from the Connecticut Law Tribune in 2005 and said looking back at the award now made her feel she has “come full circle” in her career. First runner-up Jon Bauer saluted the honorees and fellow attorneys in the crowd for “standing up for due process for the rights of the undocumented immigrants, refugees and poor people,” as he has done as director of UConn Law School's Asylum and Human Rights Clinic.

“I'm really honored to be a nominee and to be sharing the stage with Dana and Moy. As a clinical law teacher, I have the best job in the world. I get to sit around with engaged and hard-working law students and talk about all the interesting issues with them while they do all the hard work. It's especially gratifying to me that a lot of former students go on to become leaders in the bar.”

In addition to winning 135 of 145 litigated asylum cases through the clinic, Bauer's students travel to an annual weeklong Immigration Detention Service Project, providing assistance to detained asylum seekers in Pennsylvania. More than 200 people have obtained protection from removal and a path to citizenship through the clinic's work.

Bauer also advocated successfully on the issue of disability discrimination in Connecticut's bar admissions process, helping to obtain a Connecticut Bar Examining Committee decision this spring to eliminate all mental health inquiries from the bar application form.

“We are proud to name Dana Bucin the Connecticut Law Tribune's Attorney of the Year for the incredibly important work she has done to protect immigrants' rights at a critical time in our country,” said Zack Needles, global managing editor, regional brands for Law.com. “All three Attorney of the Year contenders exemplify the heights to which the legal profession can rise and the impact attorneys can have on their communities and beyond. Congratulations to all of our winners and finalists, as well as to their families, firms and organizations.”