Atlanta attorney Glenn Hendrix is the new chair of the American Bar Association’s International Law Section.
Mr. Hendrix, managing partner of Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, officially assumed the chairmanship at the ABA annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month.
The ABA’s 23,000-member international law section is designed to connect the U.S. legal system with the rest of the world. It is a mission that has become increasingly important with the rapid growth of global commerce.
“It is a portal to American lawyers for the outside world and likewise for foreign bar associations and non-U.S. lawyers to the American legal community,” Mr. Hendrix told GlobalAtlanta in an interview last April. “There are very few law firms, at least business law firms, that don’t touch on global matters. Evidence may be located abroad. One of the parties is from abroad. It really permeates legal practice.”
For the next year, Mr. Hendrix will represent the ABA’s law section at events around the world. For Mr. Hendrix, international issues are not new. With a father in the U.S. Air Force and a mother from Great Britain, he lived all over the world as a child, including nine years in England.
“It certainly played a role in my interest in international matters,” he said. As a business litigation specialist, the Emory University law school graduate is often involved in overseas cases and has experience in international arbitration.
He obtained an arbitration award for a client which sold an oil refinery to China, for example, and he obtained a decision holding a Ugandan bank liable for one of its subsidiaries in an international sales transaction. He sees international law as only increasing in importance, a trend that was illustrated by the tumultuous world markets of recent months.