Kay Standridge Kress, a partner in Pepper Hamilton‘s Detroit office, was featured in the January 12, 2015 article, “A Sidebar With Kay Standridge Kress”, published in Michigan Lawyers Weekly. This article focuses on Ms. Kress being appointed chair of the Business Bankruptcy Committee of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association.
Michigan Lawyers Weekly: One of your goals as chair is to get more young lawyers and law students involved with the committee. That could be a challenging demographic to crack.
Ms. Kress: Luckily, my [committee] predecessor, Patricia Redmond, who is an adjunct law professor at the University of Miami, and another professor, Jessica Gable of University of Georgia, have a lot of interaction with students. They bring theirs students to our meetings, and I have appointed a new committee for them to kind of shepherd around our young lawyers and law students and integrate them into the committee, and let them get involved by being program materials coordinators and doing some writing.
The ABA is very good at trying to bring young lawyers in. They have an Ambassador Program and a Diplomat Program, and that’s for minority students and young students. [Law firms] are hiring again, but it was a very difficult market a few years ago, and those students who have been involved at the ABA level actually have two benefits when they look for jobs — one, because they’ve interacted with lawyers, so people know them; and secondly, they have the experience of being involved with the ABA and that’s always a good thing on a resume.
The full article can be viewed online with a subscription at http://milawyersweekly.com/news/2015/01/12/a-sidebar-with-kay-standridge-kress.
Pepper Hamilton LLP is a multi-practice law firm with more than 500 lawyers nationally. The firm provides corporate, litigation and regulatory legal services to leading businesses, governmental entities, nonprofit organizations and individuals throughout the nation and the world. The firm was founded in 1890.