Solo & Small Firm Section bestows annual awards
The Solo & Small Firm Section each year presents awards that recognize exceptional achievements, professionalism, and contributions.
“The recipients of our annual awards have gone ‘above and beyond’ in their professions or in volunteer service,” said immediate past Chair Jacina Parson, a Pinellas senior assistant county attorney and former director of The Florida Bar’s Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism. “We are so pleased that the section can honor these deserving individuals for their accomplishments.”
Theresa Jean-Pierre Coy
Tradition of Excellence Award — Theresa Jean-Pierre Coy (posthumously). This award honors recipients whose efforts throughout that year have been beneficial to The Florida Bar and specifically to the general practitioner and is intended to encourage participation by all Bar members in activities that benefit the general practitioner and the community at large.
Coy, who succumbed to cancer in April, was a longtime leader in Tampa Bay’s legal community and recipient of multiple awards for professional and community service. Her background includes a broad range of experience as a civil attorney, private criminal defense attorney, assistant public defender, and adjunct professor at both her alma mater Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport and Cooley Law School in Riverview. In the community, Coy served as president of the George Edgecomb Bar Association, a member of the Mayor’s African American Advisory Council and many professional organizations in the legal field, and as both a hearing officer and Civil Service Board attorney for the City of Tampa. She also led the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office Conviction Review Unit. Coy earned her law degree from Stetson after graduating from Florida A&M University in 2002.
Linda Calvert-Hanson and Jacina Parson
Walter S. Crumbley Award — Linda Calvert-Hanson. This award is given each year to an individual who has made a significant contribution to practice management in Florida. The award was originally created by the Practice Management and Development Section in honor of the long service by Judge Walter S. Crumbley on the Practice Management and Development Committee and on the Technology Law Committee.
Nora Riva Bergman
Mentor of the Year Award — Nora Riva Bergman. This award recognizes an outstanding Florida-licensed attorney who has shown remarkable achievements in the area of mentorship to younger attorneys and/or law students in Florida. The award honors a lawyer who has demonstrated above-and-beyond efforts to achieve a high standard of professionalism in the delivery of mentorship.
Florida Registered Paralegals, from the left, Patricia DeRamus, Priscilla Warren, Sherry Webber, Beatrice LeVine and Jennifer Heape.
Paralegal of the Year Award—Sherry Webber CP FCP FRP. This award is given to that singular paralegal who has contributed significantly to the community and/or (his) (her) law firm. The section’s purpose in providing this award is to recognize that very deserving individual for above-and-beyond efforts in achieving a high standard of professionalism in the delivery of paralegal services.
