Lawrence R. Ahern III, managing partner of Burr & Forman’s Nashville office and an adjunct professor of law at Vanderbilt, has been elected president of the American Board of Certification (ABC), which advocates attorney certification in consumer and business bankruptcy and creditors’ rights law.
Ahern, who is a Fellow in the American College of Bankruptcy, is an expert in business transactions whose practice with Burr & Forman focuses on creditors’ rights and bankruptcy, as well as commercial law. He teaches Secured Transactions at Vanderbilt, and he is also a member of the LL.M. Bankruptcy Advisory Committee at St. John’s University School of Law. He is a former Director of the American Bankruptcy Institute, the Turnaround Management Association and the Mid-South Commercial Law Institute. He earned his law and undergraduate degrees at Vanderbilt.
Ahern has been involved with the certification of legal specialists, both nationally and in Tennessee, for more than 15 years. He represented the Tennessee Bar Association in the formulation of Tennessee’s regulatory system governing attorney certification in 1991. He subsequently served for six years as chair of the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Commission on Continuing Legal Education and Specialization and was a director of ABC before being elected its president at the organization’s annual meeting this month.
The ABC is a non-profit credentialing organization sponsored by the American Bankruptcy Institute and the Commercial Law League of America. The three certifications ABC grants are accredited by the American Bar Association and the Tennessee Commission on Continuing Legal Education and Specialization.