Each year the Tennessee Bar Association recognizes outstanding service by attorneys and law students who have dedicated their time to helping others. The awards given are the Harris Gilbert Pro Bono Volunteer of the Year, the Ashley T. Wiltshire Public Service Attorney of the Year and the Law Student Volunteer of the Year. Read the stories of those recognized here.

Ian Hennessey and Father Timothy Sullivan CSP joined forces at the Faith and Justice Legal Clinic at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Knoxville last summer. Photo by Tracy Chain.

Harris Gilbert Pro Bono Volunteer of the Year

This year’s Harris Gilbert award is presented to two Knoxville attorneys — Bill Coley and Ian Hennessey. The award recognizes private attorneys who have contributed a significant amount of pro bono work and have demonstrated dedication to the development and delivery of legal services to the poor. The award is named after Gilbert, a Nashville attorney and past Tennessee Bar Association president, who exemplifies this type of commitment.

Bill Coley

Even a great idea remains just that — an idea — until someone comes forward with the passion, drive and effort to make it a reality. In Knoxville, Bill Coley and Ian Hennessey were the attorneys who stepped forward to make the Faith and Justice Alliance far more than a great idea.

Since its launch just four years ago, the Knoxville program has partnered with Baptist, United Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Unitarian Universalist, Apostolic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Evangelical and nondenominational congregations to bring much needed legal services to more than 400 clients. In addition, these faith-based clinics have drawn new attorneys to the pro bono community, offering them an opportunity to put their faith into action by serving those in need of legal assistance.

These results are just what members of the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission were hoping for when they unveiled the concept for a Faith and Justice Alliance back in 2013.

“Faith communities are a natural fit with our efforts to help those in need find access to legal advice,” Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Cornelia A. Clark said at the time. “And with our goal of helping more lawyers find more occasions to provide pro bono services, this is the ideal opportunity for attorneys to put faith in action in their own worship communities.”

Those words resonated with Coley, a member at the firm of Hodges, Doughty & Carson PLLC, who at the time was president of the Knoxville Bar Association. 

“Somewhere over time the idea that using my skills as a lawyer to serve people in need as an extension of my faith had begun to take shape,” Coley says. “I also recognized that there are in my church — First Baptist of Knoxville — several lawyers and judges, and as a group we could make a positive impact in our community.  I was just not sure how to get started.”

Ian Hennessey

Hennessey, an attorney at London Amburn who at the time was serving on the KBA’s Access to Justice Committee, also heard Clark’s message and followed up by attending a Faith and Justice Summit at Belmont University in Nashville. “It was a very inspiring event, to say the least,” he says.

Putting the idea into action, Coley and Hennessey brought together Legal Aid of East Tennessee (LAET) leaders Terry Woods and Deb House and KBA Executive Director Marsha Watson to begin putting together a proposal for what would become the KBA Access to Justice Committee’s “Faith and Justice Project.”

“There are a lot of private attorneys who donate their time to assist Legal Aid clients when asked to do so,” LAET’s Kathryn Ellis said in her letter nominating the two for this award. “But to have a pair of attorneys who initiated a project that has since served more than 400 clients, has created a network of support among local faith leaders and attorneys, has taken them across Tennessee (and even into another state) to promote the model, and has established one of the most sustaining projects of both the KBA and LAET, shows an extra level of dedication to Pro Bono service and to Access to Justice.”

That commitment to serving others in their community was deeply ingrained in both Coley and Hennessey at an early age.

“The importance of service to others in our community was emphasized by my parents and family my entire life,” Coley says. “I had the good fortune to have parents who modeled community service and encouraged me to participate in a number of civic activities as a child and teenager.”

Faith has also been a key factor for both men. Hennessey recalls the Jesuits who ran his high school, teaching him “to strive to be a ‘man for and with others.’  I fall short of that ideal more than I succeed, but I’ve carried it with me everywhere I’ve gone since then.”

The clinics themselves are a reflection of this commitment to service and faith. 

“Many people feel more comfortable coming to a house of faith to discuss their problems than they would to a courthouse, bar headquarters or law school, where clinics are traditionally held,” Coley says. “We believe, therefore, that we have through this effort expanded the group of clients attending the clinics.” Hennessey agrees, noting that “there have been clinics where we’ve had almost 50 people waiting when we open the doors.”

Another “little miracle” that Hennessey says he sees at the clinics is that people with different views and different backgrounds come together and break through the polarization that is gripping our society right now.

“For me, there’s this almost tangible beauty in watching everything come together at these clinics,” he says. “People who very likely do not see the world the same way, do not vote the same way, and may even hold on to negative stereotypes about each other, come together in this space  — I would consider it sacred space — to serve others and to be served. All those ‘differences’ we hold onto in the ‘ordinary world’ just seem to melt away.”

The success of Knoxville’s Faith and Justice Alliance has not gone unnoticed. The effort is today recognized as a national leader in faith-based access to justice initiatives.  Tennessee lawyers, including  the KBA’s Lawyer Referral & Information Service (LRIS) staff members, Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) personnel, Tennessee Alliance of Legal Services (TALS) lawyers and private practice lawyers have been presenters at national conferences on Tennessee’s program of tying faith to access to justice services. 

As for Coley and Hennessey, they are modest in taking credit for the success of the initiative, praising instead the strong partnership between Legal Aid of East Tennessee and the Knoxville Bar Association, the support and commitment their respective firms give to pro bono work, and the leadership of the Tennessee Supreme Court in hatching an idea that has now grown to become a successful and meaningful program for many East Tennessee attorneys and the clients they have served.

Ashley T. Wiltshire Public Service Attorney of the Year

The Ashley T. Wiltshire Public Service Attorney of the Year Award is given to an attorney who has provided dedicated and outstanding service while employed by an organization that is primarily engaged in providing legal representation to the poor. This year’s award is given to TIM HUGHES.

Tim Hughes

Describing the impact Tim Hughes has on the Tennessee access to justice community is best done through examples — short stories of a proactive and passionate civil servant who goes above and beyond to help those in need.  

There was the time Hughes, who is the Help4TN program manager at the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services (TALS), took a call from a client suffering from serious health problems and facing the loss of TennCare benefits with a telephonic hearing only days away. Hughes connected his client with Legal Aid, but upon realizing the Legal Aid attorney would not be available for the hearing on such short notice, stepped in and attended the meeting himself, ensuring a continuance was granted and assisting his client until Legal Aid could take over. 

Or another instance in which Hughes, who lives in Nashville, visited Memphis with TALS to help conduct a legal wellness clinic, a collaboration with his former employer, Memphis Area Legal Services (MALS). During one of the last screenings of the day, the team interviewed a single mother who had multiple legal issues. MALS could not assist in the matter as it was criminal in nature, but that didn’t stop Hughes, who immediately started making phone calls. Within 30 minutes, he had gotten the client’s case placed on the docket for the next morning and had borrowed a suit from a friend for court. 

As Jeannie Kosciolek of MALS wrote in her letter of support of Hughes’s nomination, “Tim was in an unfamiliar courtroom in an ill-fitting suit with a smile on his face.” Hughes challenged an underlying issue with the charge against his client and was able to have the matter dismissed.

To understand why public service is so deeply engrained into his life, you need only take a quick look at the beginning of Hughes’s own story. His mother was a teacher, as was his father before he went to work for the federal government, and his older siblings consist of an FBI agent, two military officers and a firefighter. It can be no surprise then, that Hughes has dedicated the majority of his legal career to serving those in need of a little help. 

“I’m fortunate to have a career where I can merge my interest and skills as a lawyer with a family interest in public service,” Hughes explains. 

TALS is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to strengthen the delivery of civil legal help to vulnerable Tennesseans. In his role there, Hughes manages the web portal HELP4TN.org, a site that provides free state and federal legal resources to its users. He also leads a team of attorneys to run the statewide legal helpline, 844-HELP4TN, which provides legal advice and referrals to thousands of people each year from across the state. 

Numbers help tell the story of how well this program has done under Hughes’s leadership. In her letter nominating Hughes for this award, TALS Executive Director Ann Pruitt wrote, “In 2019, Tim led this team of part-time attorneys to serve over 6,000 vulnerable and low-income Tennesseans who are facing serious legal problems that affect the most basic human needs, such as housing, access to benefits needed to sustain a family in crisis, protection from abuse, and family support. The 2019 milestone of providing triage, legal coaching, and planning to 6,000 Tennesseans with a lean part-time staff is extraordinary.”  

Pruitt writes that the 2019 record Hughes set is largely because of his ability to “constantly innovate and adapt to community need in order to serve the most people possible,” and credits Hughes for increasing operational efficiency of the program. In its infancy, the helpline required callers to leave a voicemail and an attorney would call them back. Hughes found that only 65% of clients would answer the call back—a process he thought was wasting too much of the lawyers’ time. Through automated workflow and implementing an intake service to schedule appointments, Hughes’s team now reaches 90% of their clients. 

“I love my job,” Hughes says. “I love that we have the opportunity to serve people every day.  Our callers are good folks who are going through tough times. They’re often quite pleased just to speak with an attorney, but I feel that most gain a clearer understanding of their rights and responsibilities.”

Of course, no tale is complete without a love story. Hughes met his wife, fellow attorney Erin Hughes, during their undergraduate years at the University of Tennessee before they both took off across the state to earn their law degrees at the University of Memphis. He is quick to credit her as being the person who inspires him most. 

After law school, Hughes went into private practice, gaining experience in all things family law: divorce, child support, custody, dependency and neglect. When he realized MALS had an opening to represent domestic violence survivors, his gut told him that’s where he needed to be. A few years later, that same intuition led him to TALS where he’s been since 2013, helping to launch HELP4TN, the first civil legal helpline in the state.

“I was attracted to this because we were going to be starting something from scratch,” he says. “The Tennessee Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission partnered with International Paper to fund and create a helpline to serve those who couldn’t travel to clinics and maybe weren’t as comfortable finding help online. We launched with one attorney (me), a phone, and an Excel spreadsheet. In the seven years that followed, we’ve been able to build on our strong foundation.”

That foundation, Pruitt writes, was made strong thanks to Hughes’s dedication to training his team. She writes, “As the team has grown, Tim ensured that each new member spent time with him learning the skills that make him so effective including de-escalation tactics for interviewing and counseling clients in crisis over the phone, and empathetic listening to gain the trust of helpline callers.”

“He has a true servant’s heart and is a highly skilled attorney with broad substantive legal knowledge,” she adds. 

There’s still plenty more of Hughes’s story that’s yet to be written, but there’s one takeaway he hopes TALS clients understand.

“We want them to know that there are lawyers out there that care about them and are willing to fight for them.” 

—  Kate Prince

Law Student Volunteer of the Year

The Law Student Volunteer of the Year recognizes a Tennessee law student who provides outstanding volunteer services while working with an organization that provides legal representation to the indigent. This year’s honoree is VANESSA ZAPATA, a 2019 Vanderbilt Law School graduate.

Vanessa Zapata

Vanessa Zapata has settled in Nashville, by way of New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Panama. Vanderbilt Law School drew her to Tennessee, she says, because it has a strong interest in students who want to pursue public interest law. She has stayed to work full-time at the Tennessee Justice Center as the George Barrett Social Justice Legal Fellow. Graduating in 2019 with her law degree, she is the TBA’s Law Student Volunteer of the Year. 

Zapata, 29, always knew she would work in some area of social justice, first considering careers in community organizing or social work but, she says, she understood how important knowing the law is part of any public interest work in supporting community. 

After graduation from Mount Holyoke College, she worked on a several farms, with an interest in sustainable agriculture and food access. Then she headed to Panama for a year-long stint in the Peace Corps, then worked at a nonprofit promoting and supporting women-owned businesses. Then she worked as a paralegal in New Mexico.

As she continued to discern her direction, her mother had some advice for her, to help her decide. 

“She is the reason why I went to law school,” Zapata says. Her mother is a lawyer working in health care. She told her daughter, “If you want to do social justice work while also taking care of your family, being a lawyer is a good option.” Zapata adds, “She did it, so, I thought, I’ll do it!”

Vanderbilt turned out to be a great choice, giving her many opportunities. 

“Vanessa has been extraordinarily active in pro bono work during her time at Vanderbilt … and has become a real pro bono leader,” writes Spring A. Miller in her nomination of Zapata. Miller is assistant dean for public interest at
Vanderbilt Law School.

“She served as the Vanderbilt Immigration Law Society’s pro bono director during her second year and threw herself into preparing bond motions for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeastern Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI). She did extraordinary work on those motions, gathering documents from afar from family members of detainees and preparing the bond motions themselves.” Zapata is bilingual, also speaking Spanish, which she says “allowed us to have more material evidence for each person.” It took drive and empathy to do this work, but also the ability to let it go. “Once I provided details on front end, I don’t know what happened [in each case],” she says. 

The Immigration Law Society connected students from Tennessee Immigrants and Rights Coalition (TIRC) and Justice For Our Neighbors (JFON). “I was a support there, she says, helping coordinate volunteer opportunities. “That led me to doing work at the immigration clinic at Vanderbilt,” where she was also able to do some appellate work.

She did pro bono work for Vanderbilt’s Turner Family Community Enterprise Clinic. In her 2L summer, Zapata got funding from Vanderbilt to work at the Tennessee Justice Center, . helping vulnerable low-income families access health care. She later applied for and received the George Barrett fellowship, which provided funding for to work there for another year. This is where she currently works.

As a 3L, Vanessa served as the Vanderbilt Bar Association’s community service director. In this capacity, she worked to cultivate and disseminate pro bono opportunities for the entire student body. She created a monthly newsletter of pro bono opportunities for students. 

“This newsletter and its associated database,” Miller writes, “represent a tremendous investment in Vanderbilt’s pro bono program, from which our students will benefit for years to come.” Zapata also continued to do remote pro bono bond work for SIFI and was co-director of the law school’s Re-entry Entrepreneurship Project, a partnership with Project Return aimed at supporting individuals with a history of criminal justice system involvement who aspire to start their own businesses.

She loves a lot of things about working at the TJC. “It is a smaller organization,” she says, “so you wear a bunch of hats. Most of the time I’m in the office representing clients through appeals processes and applications of public benefits.” But she also travels to network with various groups, “so I could be more informed for our clients we serve.”

She says her favorite part of the job is getting to work with clients. “I enjoy being able to learn from them about their experiences with these programs; to help them access a better life and [find] more opportunities and be as strong as they can be. There are a lot of barriers to [signing up for] these programs. It is interesting to learn how folks who already have so much on their plate figure out how to navigate and keep going and be cheerful. They are so happy to have someone on their team for something they have been fighting for, and to voice their concerns about, for years.”

The most difficult part of the job, she says, is “when we have to tell a client ‘we can’t do anything for you.’ It’s hard when someone who is basically reaching out for help, saying ‘I’m facing a tough time and need assistance,’ and we have to say, ‘I’m sorry, the way our policies are don’t provide an option for us to provide support for you in this area right now.’”

To hear her talk, though, it sounds like she can’t believe her good luck to have arrived at this perfect-fit job. “I’m thankful for TJC for providing so much work experience and knowledge,” she says.

The TJC is grateful to have Zapata working there, too. “Vanessa is a star!” TJC Executive Director Michele Johnson says. “Her dedication and promise were evident as a student intern. We are thrilled to have her back at TJC full time as a lawyer, where she is once again making such a difference in her clients’ lives.”

Vanessa Zapata is content with her job and settled in Nashville with her partner, who is also a lawyer (she met him in law school), and two dogs. “I love working with my clients. But it does get stressful sometimes,” she admits. To help with that off the job, she knits, crochets, embroiders, paints and reads.

She says she appreciates Vanderbilt for giving her a foot in the door to pursue a public interest law job. “It’s difficult for folks to get into the world right away [after law school] – there are not too many funded opportunities for people to be lawyers in public interest.” 

It has been a win-win situation. Vanderbilt’s Miller summed it up: “Vanessa is a real pro bono doer and leader. She has made a significant direct impact on the lives of vulnerable individuals through her work … and she is helping to inspire and enable other Vanderbilt students to pursue pro bono opportunities through her leadership.” 

—  Suzanne Craig Robertson

BARRY KOLAR is Tennessee Bar Association assistant executive director. KATE PRINCE is TBA digital media and leadership development coordinator.  SUZANNE ROBERTSON is editor of the Tennessee Bar Journal.