Yesterday, we caught up with Sidley Austin's Tim Webster, newly-elected DC Bar President-Elect. His tenure as president to the 100,000-member organization will start in 2015, but we wanted to get you some facts about him early.
1) He's the third Sidley lawyer to be elected to this position, following Ron Flagg (who's now Legal Service Corp GC) and George Jones.
2) He spent six years ('04-10) as pro bono GC to the DC Bar (so he jokes that he knows where the skeletons are hidden). His work included business issues and defending the Bar in litigation.
3) He's a longtime environmental buff—working in the DOJ's environment department before law school, being editor-in-chief of UVA Law's Environmental Law Journal, and later returning to DOJ as trial attorney in its Environmental Enforcement Section.
4) Tim's environmental work has made it up to the Supreme Court: in February, colleague Peter Keisler argued a case Tim had been working on for four years, challenging the EPA's regulations of greenhouse-gas emissions.
5) Two big goals for his president-elect year are helping president Brigida Benitez revise the Bar's strategic plan, and increasing non-dues revenue to maintain Bar programming.
6) Tuesday's annual Bar meeting marks when Tim is officially president-elect, though the officers aren't sworn in by Chief Judge Eric Washington until the first board meeting in July.
7) Tim almost didn't practice law: His father was a lawyer, so he wanted to forge a different path (until he noticed that the biggest environmental players had law degrees).
8) In his spare time, Tim does woodworking and made his living room coffee table. (Just call him Ron Swanson sans 'stache.)
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