Judge Nancy F. Atlas (Ret.) to Receive the 2024 American Inns of Court James E. Coleman Jr. Award for Professionalism in the Fifth Circuit
May 02 2024 - 9:15AM
Business Wire
Nancy F. Atlas has been selected to receive the prestigious 2024
American Inns of Court James E. Coleman Jr. Award for
Professionalism in the Fifth Circuit. After serving as a U.S.
district judge for the Southern District of Texas, Houston
Division, Atlas founded and provides mediation, arbitration, and
other services through Atlas ADR, PLLC. Atlas will receive the
award during the 2024 Judicial Conference of the Fifth Circuit in
May.
“Judge Atlas served for 27 years as a consummate civil servant,
admired and well respected by her peers, a mentor for many, and a
well-respected jurist,” writes President-elect Iftikhar Ahmed and
other leaders of the Honorable Nancy F. Atlas Intellectual Property
American Inn of Court, who nominated their Inn’s namesake for the
award. “While on the bench, Judge Atlas was widely acknowledged as
having a keen legal mind and of always exhibiting the highest
levels of integrity.”
Nominated by President Bill Clinton, Atlas became a U.S.
district judge for the Southern District of Texas in 1995. She took
senior status in 2014 and retired in 2022.
Mediation has long played an important role in Atlas’s career.
From 2017 to 2021, she was one of the judges appointed to help
mediate Puerto Rico’s insolvency cases. For most of her judicial
career, she also supervised the Southern District’s Alternative
Dispute Resolution Program. She cofounded the Houston chapter of
the Association of Attorney-Mediators Inc.
Before becoming a judge, Atlas was an assistant U.S. attorney
for the Southern District of New York (Civil Division) in New York
City and a shareholder in the Houston law firm Sheinfeld, Maley
& Kay PC in Houston. She pioneered the use of mediation in
commercial cases in Houston, mediating nearly 500 cases between
1990 and 1995.
Now that Atlas has left the bench, she provides mediation and
arbitration services, presides over mock trials and moot court
sessions, consults on litigation and settlement strategies, and
conducts neutral case evaluations through her company Atlas ADR.
She is a member of Federal Arbitration Inc.’s Panel of
Distinguished Neutrals.
Atlas cofounded the Atlas IP Inn and serves as one of its
judicial counselors.
Atlas earned a magna cum laude undergraduate degree in
mathematics and cum laude degree in political science from Tufts,
graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1971. She earned her law degree
from New York University School of Law in 1974.
The American Inns of Court, headquartered in Alexandria,
Virginia, inspires the legal community to advance the rule of law
by achieving the highest level of professionalism through example,
education, and mentoring. The organization’s membership includes
nearly 30,000 federal, state, and local judges; lawyers; law
professors; and law students in more than 360 chapters nationwide.
More information is available at www.innsofcourt.org.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240502967737/en/
American Inns of Court Contact: Cindy Dennis Awards &
Scholarships Coordinator (571) 319-4703 |
cdennis@innsofcourt.org