Memphis lawyer Lucian T. Pera will serve as president-elect of the Tennessee Bar Association during the 2016-2017 bar year, supporting TBA president Jason H. Long of the law firm of Lowe Yeager & Brown in Knoxville.
Pera will then serve as TBA’s president in 2017. “The TBA is the coolest and most vibrant bar association in the country, and it’s a really unique opportunity to serve as president-elect and president,” he said.
Pera is a partner in the Memphis office of Adams and Reese, where he practices in the area of commercial litigation, media law, legal ethics and professional responsibility. A Memphis native, Pera has practiced law in his hometown since 1986. He practiced law for 20 years with Armstrong Allen before joining and helping open the Memphis office of Adams and Reese in 2006.
Pera graduated from Princeton University with honors before earning his law degree at VLS in 1985.
Pera has been active in the TBA since his first year of law practice, beginning in the bar’s Young Lawyer Division and rising to serve as YLD president in 1993-94. For almost a decade starting in 1995, he led the bar’s legal ethics committee, which wrote and successfully proposed to the Tennessee Supreme Court a completely revised set of lawyer ethics rules patterned after the American Bar Association’s model rules. At the same time, he also served on the ABA Ethics 2000 Commission, which overhauled the model rules for the entire United States in 2002.
Pera has also been active in the American Bar Association, serving in its governing House of Delegates since 1990 and serving as ABA treasurer from 2011-14. He currently chairs the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility, the home of the ABA’s core lawyer ethics and professional responsibility committees. He also serves as president of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that seeks to improve citizen access to public information and open government in the state.