The competition for 2020 Lawyer of the Year honors was not a close one, not even one little bit. The top two candidates — Marc Elias and Stacey Abrams — each had votes in the hundreds, but the new titleholder secured almost 100 more votes than the second-place finisher.
Before we announce which of the two 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
- 2018: Michael Avenatti
- 2019: Christopher “Eat a Bowl of Dicks” Hook
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In a year where some of the most important news in the country circled around the presidential election, it makes sense that our top two contenders played incredibly large roles in how it played out. But which one secured the votes to come out on top?
That would be Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie partner who leads Democracy Docket and continues to work tirelessly to protect the voting rights of all Americans as well as the legitimacy of 2020’s election results. Elias earned 39 percent of the vote in our annual contest, and while the election was over in November, he can’t stop — won’t stop — fighting for democracy. We’re four days into the new year, and Biden’s inauguration is fast approaching, so of course there’s a new election scandal. Elias is here to shut down one of the wildest claims made yet by an ally of the outgoing president:
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1345887358101688320
Congratulations to our Lawyer of the Year finalists, and very special congratulations to our 2020 Lawyer of the Year, Marc Elias. Thanks to his zealous representation, America will be leaving the Trump years with its democracy intact. 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.