Adams and Reese Partner Lucian Pera Takes Office as ABA Treasurer

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (August 22, 2011) - Adams and Reese Partner Lucian Pera, in the firm’s Memphis office, was installed as Treasurer of the American Bar Association, at the close of the organization’s annual meeting, held August 4-9 in Toronto, Canada. Pera will serve a three-year term, concluding at the close of the ABA Annual Meeting in August 2014. The ABA is the largest voluntary professional organization in the world.

Pera was nominated last year for the post at the ABA Midyear Meeting in February 2010 in Orlando, Florida, and has served since August 2010 as Treasurer-Elect. As Treasurer, Pera also serves as a member of the ABA’s Board of Governors and its Executive Committee.

With nearly 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is the national voice of the legal profession, working to improve the administration of justice, promoting programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accrediting law schools, providing continuing legal education, and working to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.

Pera has a long record of service to the profession having served on the ABA Board of Governors, in the ABA House of Delegates, and as a member of the Ethics 2000 Commission that revised the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are now the model for the lawyer ethics rules in virtually every American jurisdiction. Pera also formerly chaired the ABA Board of Governors Finance Committee and the ABA Standing Committee on Technology and Information Systems, and has been a member of the ABA House of Delegates, primarily representing the Tennessee Bar Association, for all but three years since 1991.

Pera led the Tennessee Bar Association’s ethics committee from 1995 through 2009, including spearheading several TBA petitions to the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking lawyer ethics rules revisions. These included the TBA’s successful petition that led to Tennessee adopting in 2002 its own version of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to replace Tennessee’s prior ethics rules, which had been in place since 1970.

At Adams and Reese, Pera focuses his practice on commercial litigation, legal ethics and lawyer professional responsibility work, and media law. His civil litigation practice has ranged widely, including a variety of commercial, personal injury and intellectual property litigation. He regularly provides expert witness testimony in matters concerning legal ethics, professional responsibility and the standard of care for lawyers and law firms. He also advises businesses seeking to do business with lawyers about how they may do so legally and ethically.

Pera writes and speaks frequently, both nationally and in Tennessee, on legal ethics and professional responsibility and media law, and conducts presentations and seminars for national audiences.

Adams and Reese is a multidisciplinary law firm with offices strategically located throughout the southern United States and Washington, DC. American Lawyer includes Adams and Reese on its distinguished list of the nation's top law firms - "The Am Law 200.” The National Law Journal also includes the firm on the "NLJ 250" list of the nation's largest law firms.