Serving on Bar Associations to Help People Get Access to Lawyers

The idea of throwing herself into bar activities didn't come quickly to Linda A. Klein, slated to become president-elect of the American Bar Association this year and president in 2016.

After graduating from Washington and Lee law school, she moved to Atlanta in 1983. She joined the Atlanta Bar Association's Atlanta Council of Younger Lawyers to meet people. As a board member, she couldn't say no when assigned to perform a task no one else wanted, a task she calls “too boring to even tell you about.”

Pressed, she says she polled lawyers on their feelings about the new uniform rules of court and then wrote about the results. This caught the attention of Atlanta lawyer Ben Weinberg Jr., who chaired the State Bar of Georgia's committee on uniform rules. One thing led to another and eventually he was inviting her to run for the seat he was vacating on the state bar board of governors, which she won.

“It was a bit of an old boys' club,” she says, but “I just didn't let that stop me or slow me down.” In 1997, she became the first woman elected president of the state bar. The news was picked up and soon her telephone was ringing. “I got some very sad calls from women who were victims of domestic violence, and they needed a lawyer,” says Klein. “They felt invisible.”