Virginia Lawyers Weekly VA Lawyers Weekly
HOT SPRINGS — The Virginia Bar Association honored two leaders in the community of Virginia lawyers who practice before the State Corporation Commission at its summer meeting last month at The Homestead.
Anthony J. Gambardella Jr. and Guy T. Tripp III received the VBA’s William B. Spong Jr. Professionalism Award. The two men were lauded for having “nurtured, inspired and cultivated a generation of practitioners.”
Gambardella served in the Virginia attorney general’s office, as general counsel of the State Corporation Commission and with the law firm Woods Rogers.
Tripp worked at Hunton & Williams LLP.
VBA President James Patrick Guy II said he was just one attorney out of many who benefited from the guidance of the recipients in the exemplary environment of collegiality that permeates the legal profession in Virginia.
“Your examples and your direct encouragements made us better lawyers, improved the administration of the regulatory process, enhanced the public welfare and sustained the culture of collegiality that thrives today and will persevere for many years after your recent retirements,” Guy told the honorees.
The Spong award, founded in 1997, has recognized just nine honorees. They include the initial recipient, Chief Justice Harry L. Carrico of the Supreme Court of Virginia in 1997; former U.Va. law professor Daniel J. Meador in 1999; the retiring executive secretary of the state Supreme Court, Robert N. Baldwin, and the director of judicial planning for the office of the executive secretary, Kathy L. Mays, both in 2005; and two past VBA presidents, William R. Van Buren III in 2009 and Jeanne F. Franklin in 2014.
Summer Meeting Award
The VBA presented its 2016 Summer Meeting Award to Marshall M. Curtis, a principal in the Reston law firm of Whitham, Curtis & Cook P.C.
Curtis was cited for his leadership in the VBA; among other contributions, Guy said that Curtis’s “leadership was critical to the formation of the Intellectual Property Law Section (now the Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law Section) of the VBA in 1997.”
Curtis currently is serving his fourth three-year term on the executive committee of the VBA’s Law Practice Management Division. He has led the Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law Section and has been a VBA member since 1994.
When he entered private practice in 1988, Curtis had worked for 20 years as a patent examiner in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Past recipients of the Summer Meeting Award include Justice and Mrs. Lewis F. Powell Jr., Justice Elizabeth B. Lacy, Then-Gov. Tim Kaine, George K. Martin of McGuireWoods LLP, law school deans and U.S. attorneys.
