Accepting the 2023 OBA Award for Excellence in Civil Litigation on November 9, in front of a Ritz-Carlton dining room filled with friends, family and leaders of the bench and civil litigation bar, Linda Plumpton spoke of the alchemy of compelling advocacy, the ability of lawyers to change lives, and the responsibility to use gifts of persuasion to guard hard-fought victories in the fight for a fair and equitable society. We’ve extracted some inspiring excerpts from her speech below.

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“As advocates, our greatest skill is not that we just string together words in a coherent way to make a point; it’s the alchemy that we bring when we combine our mastery of the facts and of law with empathy, with human connection and with our ability to tell the stories of the people we represent.”

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“Our job is less a question, I’d say, of what to say, but how to say it. How do I focus the judge on what really matters? What can I draw on from the record or the case law, but not just that, from my personal lived experience or from our collective lived experience that will help me persuade?”

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“My dream is that my greatest professional accomplishment at the end of my career, which will hopefully not be for some time, is not the cases that I argued – some I won, some I lost – but that I leave behind the same legacy of excellence and collaboration of the firm for those who come after me that I inherited from those who came before me.”

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“I believe in our ability as advocates to change lives because I’ve lived it. The series of hard-fought cases that led to marriage equality in this country changed my life and that of my children. And one of the highlights of my career was the opportunity to play a role in those cases.”

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“We as advocates are the voices through which the vulnerable speak. Ours is the language of fairness and justice, and we have the skills to be bulwarks against the rising tide of hate in all its forms – antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism – that is engulfing too much of this world and too much of our country. We must never be blind to it and never be silent.”

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“So much of what makes our society special was achieved by people in this room and those who came before us in courtrooms and in hearing rooms, using the power of words, using their gifts of persuasion, crafting arguments, enduring sleepless nights, staring at a page or a screen, paring back arguments, trying to get the order of ideas just right, trying to determine the best point of emphasis. We need to use those skills to guard the society that we helped to achieve jealously.”