Announcement: COSAL President Lin Chan is Awarded the Inaugural AAI/COSAL Hollis Salzman Memorial Leadership Award
COSAL congratulates COSAL President Lin Chan for receiving the inaugural AAI/COSAL Hollis Salzman Memorial Leadership Award, which was presented at the AAI Antitrust Awards Night in November. This award, named in honor of Hollis Salzman, who served as COSAL President from 2017 – 2019, was created to honor a woman and/or a person from another traditionally underrepresented group who personifies Hollis’ leadership in the antitrust bar, commitment to service, and dedication to mentoring and supporting attorneys from underrepresented groups.
Shortly after Hollis passed away last year, we at COSAL knew that we wanted to do something to honor her memory. We decided to create an award in Hollis’s memory that would honor her legacy, and joined forces with AAI, which was considering a similar idea.
In putting the award criteria together, COSAL and AAI identified those things that made Hollis special as a lawyer.
The successful award recipient would be:
An antitrust lawyer with 10+ years of experience
A woman or a person from a traditionally underrepresented group
With a demonstrated track record of integrity and collegiality in their dealings with members of the plaintiffs and defense antitrust bar and the Courts
Who is active in mentoring other members of the plaintiffs’ antitrust bar
Who advances opportunities for women or underrepresented groups in the bar and
Who is a demonstrated leader in their firm, antitrust related organizations and the bar more generally.
Lin Chan encompasses all of that and more. She is a superb choice to honor Hollis’ contributions to the antitrust bar and to society in general.
Lin has amassed an extraordinary record of leadership at her firm, Leiff Cabraser Heimann and Bernstein, in the San Francisco legal Community, and in the plaintiffs’ antitrust bar. She is or has been:
Chair of the Antitrust and Business Regulation Section of the SF Bar Association;
Co-Chair of the Fair and Impartial Courts Committee of the ABA Civil Rights and Social Justice Section;
Civil Rights Committee co-Chair and the future President (in two years) of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area;
A Board member of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus (Board Member, 2013 – Present).
Law360 Editorial Advisory Board, for Competition
an Advisory Board Member of the American Antitrust Institute (AAI); and
the Treasurer, Secretary, Vice President, and now President of COSAL.
Lin is regularly a speaker at regional and national conferences.
Lin is an important voice for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion both within her firm and in the antitrust bar more generally.
Lin has been a long-time and dedicated member of the LCHB Hiring Committee and is an important voice in the hiring process for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Lin goes out of her way to schedule one-on-one check-in meetings with junior attorneys at LCHB, particularly women and members of underrepresented groups. At LCHB, Lin helped organize an informal affinity group for female attorneys of color, to provide support for one another and discuss ways to improve their LCHB experience.
At COSAL, Lin proposed and is chairing our newly created Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee and will be chairing an upcoming DEI symposium presently in the planning stages.
Lin is warm and welcoming, shy and self-effacing – things that lawyers are not necessarily known for.
When she received the phone call telling her that she had won, Lin was literally speechless, having assumed that she would be told that she hadn’t been selected.
Typical of Lin, her acceptance speech was focused on others, not herself. In particular, she spoke passionately and movingly about the judge she clerked for, the late Damon Keith of the Sixth Circuit, and about Hollis’ “shining example.” Here is Lin, in her own, eloquent words:
I am honored to accept the award, particularly because, as a young, diverse antitrust attorney, Hollis was a beacon of light and helped me believe that I too could make the antitrust bar my home.
I am also excited about what creating this award means for AAI and COSAL’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity.
I would like to thank my judge and mentor, the late Damon Keith of the Sixth Circuit. He taught me about the law, but he also taught me about life. Judge Keith graduated from Howard Law School in 1949. He moved back to his home town, Detroit, and started working as a janitor cleaning segregated bathrooms while studying for the bar. Through persistence and the support of his mentors, he eventually became one of the first African American federal judges; the chief judge in 1975, presiding over an otherwise all white bench on the Eastern District of Michigan, and then served as a judge for the second highest court in the country. Back in chambers, Judge Keith used to lecture me monthly (if not weekly) that we are all walking on floors we did not scrub and walking through doors we did not open. So our job, he told me, is to scrub those floors and open those doors so that others may come after us.
Hollis was a shining example of someone who scrubbed the floors and opened the doors for the next generation. She opened the door for me.
I hope that by creating this award and celebrating the life of Hollis Salzman, we can all commit to scrubbing floors and opening doors so that others may come after us and to ensuring that our antitrust bar is a model of the level playing field and fair competition to which we have dedicated our legal careers.
