Vernon Jordan, Michele Roberts Named Among “Power 100”

May 14, 2009

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(Washington, D.C.) – Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Michele A. Roberts have been named to Washington Life magazine’s “Power 100,” a list of movers and shakers who “hold sway inside the Beltway.”

Before joining Akin Gump in January 1982, Vernon Jordan served as president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, Inc. Earlier, he was executive director of the United Negro College Fund, Inc.; director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council; attorney-consultant at the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity; assistant to the executive director of the Southern Regional Council; and Georgia field director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as an attorney in private practice in Arkansas and Georgia.

A graduate of DePauw University and the Howard University Law School, Mr. Jordan holds honorary degrees from more than 50 colleges and universities in America. In 2008 The National Law Journal named him as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America. He is the author of Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2001) and Make it Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out (Public Affairs, 2008).

Michele Roberts’ practice focuses on complex civil and white collar criminal litigation. Before entering private practice, she served for eight years in the office of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was trial counsel in more than 40 jury trials and ultimately was named chief of the office’s trial division. Among her many honors, Washingtonian magazine ranked her first among Washington’s top lawyers, calling her “the finest pure trial lawyer in Washington – magic with juries, loved by judges, feared by opposing counsel,” and Legal Times named her as one of Washington’s 10 Leading Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Ms. Roberts is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Founded in 1945, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a leading international law firm, numbers more than 900 lawyers in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

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