October 2011

Upon my arrival at our State Bar of Georgia Board of Governors meeting at Jekyll Island, a staff member handed me the traditional name tag with various colorful ribbons hanging off the bottom signifying offices, honors, etc. I’ve always felt those made me look like an admiral of the navy of a small, landlocked dictatorship.  Back in my room after dinner I removed all the ribbons.  My name and one word, “president,” is quite sufficient.

A few more figurative ribbons arrived in recent weeks. For whatever they may be worth, if anything:

  • “Super Lawyer” in Atlanta Magazine again for the

The following article was published as my President’s Column in the October 2011 issue of the Georgia Bar Journal.

————————————————————————————-

Virtuous Lawyer is Not an Oxymoron

by Kenneth L. Shigley

President, State Bar of Georgia

James[1] had great unrealized potential. Son of a minister in another Southern state, he won admission to an Ivy League university but washed out during his first year and went home to complete college and law school. A marvelous storyteller, his closing arguments could hold juries spellbound. But his cleverness was so unrestrained by mere facts that judges and other lawyers learned to distrust

It’s just a hypothesis, but an article about Parkinson’s disease in today’s New York Times may suggest an approach to brain injury rehab. The idea is that forced exercise is more beneficial to the brain than unforced exercise.

First, consider the lowly lab rat. The NYT article report a 2008 study in which rats forced to run wound up with significantly more new brain cells after eight weeks than those who ran when they chose, even though the latter animals ran faster.  Another experiment found that , mice that were required to exercise on treadmills subsequently performed better on cognitive

I’m pleased to note that my friend Teresa Roseborough is returning from New York to Atlanta next month to become General Counsel of Home Depot, Inc.

Teresa was on the short list for appointment to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Clinton administration, and was frequently mentioned as a prospect for the U. S. Supreme Court and Solicitor General of the United States at the beginning of the Obama administration. In 2006, she left Atlanta’s Sutherland law firm, where she was a partner, to  become chief litigation counsel MetLife in New York City.  Before Sutherland, she was deputy

Traumatic injury is sometimes referred to as the death of a person who is still living. An article in today’s New York Times gives a stark patient’s-eye view of what can be like. In“Starting Again After a Brain Injury,” Jane Rosset illuminates her experience with the following details:

  • Long term memory loss: “Memories that connected different parts of my life fragmented and vanished. . . . When I see my pre-accident work, I am introduced to it as if for the first time. . . . I am sometimes fed my own résumé by strangers in the street.”