Meet ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr.

H. Thomas Wells Jr., a partner and founding member at Maynard, Cooper & Gale PC, in Birmingham, Ala., became ABA president at the 2008 Annual Meeting in New York.

Wells has served in the association’s policy-making House of Delegates since 1991 and was chair of the ABA House of Delegates, the ABA’s second highest elected office, from 2002-04. He is a former chair of the ABA Section of Litigation.

In addition, Wells was co-chair of the ABA’s Special Committee on Disaster Response, which was commissioned after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. He also has been a member of the ABA’s Commission on the American Jury and the ABA Commission on the Future of the Legal Profession.

Beyond the ABA, Wells has served on numerous committees and in leadership roles in the Alabama State Bar and the Birmingham Bar Association.

Wells lives in Birmingham with his wife Jan. The couple’s two children, Lynlee Wells Palmer and H. Thomas “Trey” Wells III, are also lawyers in Birmingham and active ABA members.

Wells is the ABA’s third president from the state of Alabama. Henry Upson Sims of Birmingham was president in 1929-30, and N. Lee Cooper, also a founding member of Maynard, Cooper & Gale PC, was president in 1996-97.

Wells recently shared his thoughts with YourABA.

Q: Why did you want to be ABA president?

A: When I graduated from law school in 1975, membership in the ABA was expected. I never really thought about being ABA president when I joined. But as I became more active, I felt a good bit of satisfaction in the service work we were doing.

When I was the Alabama state delegate, I sat on the nominating committee for nine years, selecting association leaders. I started thinking that I’d like to do more for the ABA. I became chair of the House of Delegates—one of the best jobs at the ABA and one that I dearly loved. After that, one thing led to another, and here I am as president.

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Q: What does your ABA membership mean to you?

A: There are many benefits of an ABA membership; not the least of which is being part of the largest professional organization in the world that is the national voice for America’s lawyers.

There’s also the inspirational side. The ABA is an important public service organization. You join the ABA to be a part of a larger group that can actually do some good in the public arena. The last time I looked, our Rule of Law Initiative was providing legal assistance in more than 40 countries around the world. So what we’re doing is important in not just the United States, but internationally as well.

Of course there are personal rewards from membership—the affinity program discounts and educational offerings, for example. But for me, the reason for membership is to take part in the vital service work we do.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish as president?

A: I want to emphasize the common core values of the profession, the things that unite us as lawyers. As I see it, there are four primary issues of interest to all of us: access to justice; independence—both independence of the bar as a profession as well as independence of our judiciary; diversity; and the rule of law, which essentially encompasses the first three I mentioned.

One of my first endeavors is work on the issue of federal judicial nominations. We passed a resolution in the House of Delegates earlier this month concerning the establishment of bipartisan, citizen commissions that would recommend nominees for federal judgeships. I believe such commissions would significantly reduce the better part of some bitter, partisan debates over nominees. A good example is the state of Florida, where a Democratic senator and a Republican senator have come together to create a commission to generate names for district court judges. The process has worked extraordinarily well.

Also, as I’ve gone around the country talking to lawyers and bar associations, I keep hearing about challenges to the independence of state courts. We’ve begun planning a national summit in May on fair and impartial state courts that will bring together the major stakeholders around this issue.

Q: You also mentioned an interest in enhancing access to justice.

A: Research shows as many as 80 percent of low-income people have legal needs that are currently unmet. Unfortunately, funding from the Legal Services Corporation has never really been adequate to address those needs. In my home state of Alabama, more than $7 million was spent on judicial elections for appellate court races—that’s twice as much as was spent on access to justice. That’s just unconscionable. We’ve got to do something to switch that around because obviously, if you don’t have access to justice, it’s pretty hard to get justice.

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Q: Let’s talk about diversity. Why aren’t we there yet?

A: There’re a lot of reasons why we’re not there yet. Unfortunately we’re not even doing as well as other professions. Other professions, such as the medical profession and dental profession are doing a lot better in terms of diversity. We simply can’t allow that to continue as our country becomes more diverse. Only about 10 percent of the legal profession are lawyers of color. We’ve got to do better in that regard. We must figure out where the systemic barriers are and increase the number of minority lawyers in the pipeline.

Q: We will be electing a new leader in November. What does the leader of the nation’s largest lawyers’ organization want to say to the new president?

A: The first thing I would say is we’re here to serve. We will serve the administration in any way we can be helpful—whatever will help the administration the most, we want to be in the process.

We also want to build bridges to the new administration to talk about issues that affect us. The ABA is not a Republican organization or a Democratic one—we’re an organization of lawyers. There’re a lot of things that the federal government does that affects lawyers, so we want to be at the table when those issues come up. I want our voice to be heard in the administration, just like we’re heard in Congress when we testify on the Hill on legal issues.

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© 2008 American Bar Association