With 2024 in the rearview mirror, it’s now time to announce the winner of our annual Lawyer of the Year competition. The vote for the honor was not a close one, not even one little bit. Our top candidate took home more than 50% of the vote, while our second-place finisher (perhaps one of our worthiest contenders) had 26% of the total tally. In fact, the new titleholder secured almost 300 more votes than this year’s silver medalist.
Before we announce which luminary lawyer prevailed, let’s review Above the Law’s past Lawyers of the Year:
- 2007: Loyola 2L
- 2008: President Barack Obama
- 2009: Justice Sonia Sotomayor
- 2010: Law School Transparency’s Kyle McEntee and Patrick Lynch
- 2011: Professor Paul Campos
- 2012: Chief Justice John Roberts
- 2013: Roberta Kaplan
- 2014: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- 2015: Bryan “Law Hawk” Wilson
- 2016: Don McGahn
- 2018: Michael Avenatti
- 2019: Christopher “Eat a Bowl of Dicks” Hook
- 2020: Marc Elias
- 2021: Mathew Rosengart
- 2022: Ketanji Brown Jackson
In a year where the legitimacy of elections and the legitimacy of the winners of those elections took hold across the national news, it makes sense that amid a very curious voting cycle, the lawyer who came out on top noted in his self-nomination that he was “completely unqualified” to win but that “[f]ar less qualified people have won far more important elections this year.”
In the end, it was Ryan Protter, a recent law school graduate who currently serves as a law clerk in the New Jersey Appellate Division, who took home the title in our 2024 Lawyer of the Year competition. Referring to himself on LinkedIn as the “dark horse candidate” in this race, voters helped Protter “do the funniest thing ever,” and handed him the LOTY honors. Congratulations to Ryan Protter on achieving the ultimate punchline.
Speaking of law clerks, our silver medalist was Aliza Shatzman, founder and president of the Legal Accountability Project. In what seemed like a Hurculean task, she made a great deal of progress for federal law clerks this year. After what required a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Shatzman launched the Centralized Clerkships Database, essentially a “Glassdoor for Judges,” a tool meant to empower clerkship applicants with much-needed transparency and inside information from former clerks about judicial work environments. Click here to read some of her excellent columns on this topic. Congratulations to Aliza Shatzman on achieving what many once considered to be nigh impossible for federal law clerks in the United States.
Congratulations to all of our Lawyer of the Year finalists, congratulations to our 2024 Lawyer of the Year, Ryan Protter, and a very special congratulations to our runner-up, Aliza Shatzman.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.