The competition for 2018 Lawyer of the Year honors was not a close competition, not even one little bit. The top three candidates — Michael Avenatti, Robert Mueller, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — each had votes in the hundreds, but the new titleholder secured almost 300 more votes than the second-place finisher.
Before we announce which one of the three prevailed, let’s review Above the Law’s past Lawyers of the Year:
- 2007: Loyola 2L
- 2008: President Barack Obama
- 2009: Justice Sonia Sotomayor
- 2010: Law School Transparency’s Kyle McEntee and Patrick Lynch
- 2011: Professor Paul Campos
- 2012: Chief Justice John Roberts
- 2013: Roberta Kaplan
- 2014: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- 2015: Bryan “Law Hawk” Wilson
- 2016: Don McGahn
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You’ll see they come from basically two camps: “famous famous,” like President Obama and the three Supreme Court justices, and “ATL famous,” like the various critics of the law school industrial complex. Which camp won out this year?
Michael Avenatti (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Famous famous — or some would even say infamous. Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for former adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who would go on to start a chain of events that would eventually send another lawyer to jail (Michael Cohen, who finished this competition in second-to-last place) and add fuel to the fire in the FBI investigation of a sitting president, stole this competition with 44 percent of the entire vote. Like no other attorney, he was able to dominate the news throughout the course of the year and developed such a fan club that he even thought of (and then thought better of) running for president.
Congratulations to all our Lawyer of the Year finalists, and very special congratulations to our 2018 Lawyer of the Year, Michael Avenatti. Thanks to his incredibly zealous client representation and his habit of inserting himself into every pop culture legal event, America will never be the same. Well done!
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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.