Friday, March 19, 2004
Page 9
PERSONALITY PROFILE:
Betty Chim, President-Elect, Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association
New Leader of Asian American Bar Group Undaunted by Demands of Multiple Roles
By DAVID WATSON, Staff Writer
You might think Betty Chim would be a little apprehensive.
Tonight, less than five years removed from law school, Chim will be sworn in as the president of the nearly 30-year-old Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association.
Next month she will return from nearly a year on maternity leave to her job as a deputy attorney general, and her son, 10-month-old Brennan, will have to adjust to more separation from his mother than he has known his entire life.
But Chim says she isn’t intimidated. The combined demands of being a working mother and bar association leader can hardly be any greater than those made on her during the 2002 campaign of her husband, Ted Lieu, for the Torrance City Council, she suggests.
Chim notes that she managed Lieu’s successful campaign, in which he got nearly 13,000 votes—almost 3,400 more than his nearest competitor—in a field of eight candidates for three at-large seats. The campaign spanned nearly nine months, Lieu recalls, from early summer of 2001 until the March 2002 vote, a period that also included the couple’s late August wedding.
Chim calls those months “one of the most difficult and tough periods” of her life.
“We were just nonstop, 20 hours per day,” Chim explains. “Having gone through that, I just feel like, well, this may be somewhat equivalent.”
Lieu points out that a political campaign was new territory for both of them. Bar activities, however, have been a part of Chim’s routine for longer than law practice.
‘Bar Junkie’
While a student at Southwestern University School of Law, Chim was president of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, which she describes as “the most active and largest student-based organization” at the school. She also served as an officer of the National Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, helping to organize the group’s national conference in New York.
“I was quite a bar junkie already when I was a law student,” she declares.
Chim, whose younger brother is a Kaiser doctor in his first year of residency, was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States with her family as a child. Her father, a businessman and financial expert who met her mother, a former beauty queen, on a business trip to South Korea, brought the family here largely at her mother’s urging, Chim says.
Her mother “always had the American dream,” seeking greater opportunity for her children, Chim explains, though she is quick to point out that her mother’s family was hardly deprived of opportunity in South Korea. An uncle by marriage—to her mother’s sister—served a term during the 1980s as a justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court, she notes.
Chim grew up in San Marino and attended UC Irvine with little thought of becoming a lawyer. She started as a math major and then switched to chemistry.
But her father had encouraged her to study business, so she soon switched to economics—Irvine lacked a business major—and added a linguistics major during her senior year, she relates.
A laboratory science career, Chim observes, seemed to her as though it might involve too little contact with people for her taste.
Chim says some older friends were already in law school by the time she completed her undergraduate studies, and she took the LSAT “just for fun.”
She observes:
“I ended up doing much better than I expected.”
At Southwestern, Chim says, she found that law operates in a manner which is “in a way very much like linguistics.”
Linguistics and Law
She explains that both disciplines begin with a set of facts. In linguistics, she elaborates, you observe a result and try to derive a rule, while in law the rule is given and the student must apply it to derive the outcome.
A valuable part of her training, Chim notes, was the externships she served with Justice Earl Johnson Jr. of Div. Seven of this district’s Court of Appeal and with U.S. District Judge William J. Rea of the Central District of California. She benefited, Chim says, from their differing perspectives on the law.
Johnson, she points out, is on of the more liberal jurists in the state court system, while Rea is generally regarded as a conservative.
“The views they have are very different,” she recollects. Her own views, she says, probably represent a “middle ground” between those of the two.
The externship with Rea also led to lasting friendships with two of the judge’s colleagues, Judge Ronald S.W. Lew and then-Judge Carlos Moreno, now a justice of the California Supreme Court.
Talent for Networking
Lew, also a Southwestern graduate, is one of the founders of SCCLA (pronounced SKAH-la). He was the group’s fourth president in 1979-80, and is slated to install Chim as president at the group’s 29th annual installation and awards banquet this evening at the Empress Pavilion in Chinatown.
Lew says he feels no doubt that Chim is up to the job. Her enthusiasm, her history of involvement in other bar groups, and her talent for networking are “going to be an added plus for the association,” the judge says.
“She certainly has the qualifications to do it, and the energy,” Lew asserts.
Moreno, who has informally taken on the role of godfather to Brennan, says he never misses the SCCLA banquet and has tremendous respect for Chim.
“I find her to be a extremely persuasive leader, leading by example,” Moreno declares. “When she asks you to do something, you know she’s already put in three or four times the effort before she comes to you. She’s virtually unstoppable.”
Though Chim has come to the presidency early in her law career, Moreno notes, her background as an activist during her student days already set her on that path.
“In terms of the length of her involvement, I don’t think it is too short a time,” he explains. “You sort of rise within the leadership. She just happened to get a very early start.”
Defense Firm
After law school, Chim spent about two years with the Los Angeles office of the defense firm LaFollette Johnson DeHaas Fesler Silberberg & Ames before joining the attorney general’s office, where she handles criminal appeals and sometimes federal writ proceedings.
Her involvement with SCCLA dates back to law school as well, and Chim says she looks forward to the day when she can explain to Brennan that his parents “met at a bar—-a bar organization, that is.”
Lieu says that first meeting, when both were on the SCCLA board, was love at first sight. He was impressed enough to call a friend and describe the woman he had just met—something he had rarely, if ever, done before, Lieu recalls.
When he proposed two and a half years later, it was also at a board meeting—in fact, a joint meeting with the Los Angeles County Bar Association, Lieu explains.
He told Chim someone “needed to talk to her,” and ushered her into an adjoining room, Lieu says. That someone was Lieu himself.
Proposal Re-Enacted
Another former SCCLA president, state Department of Real Estate attorney Christopher K. Leong, recalls that Chim returned “shaking” and explained what had just occurred. Leong and other board members insisted the couple re-enact the proposal for their benefit, he explains, and they did.
Lieu earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford and his law degree from Georgetown University. He grew up in the Midwest and came to California as an Air Force JAG captain, settling in Torrance while stationed at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo.
Lieu is a corporate vice-president and associate general counsel for UBS Financial Services, formerly Paine Webber.
He and Chim are “like a celebrity couple” in the world of Asian American bar activists, Leong says, noting that Chim first came to his attention during his own SCLLA presidency while she was still a law student.
Leong attended a dinner at which Chim, the outgoing president, spoke about her year leading APALSA at Southwestern.
“I could see that she was very organized, but more important than that I could feel the emotion in her speech and that she had the leadership quality of really caring,” Leong says, adding:
“She had the audience in the palm of her hand. It was very moving.”
Moreno’s observations about Chim’s energy level “are well founded,” Leong says.
“She’s kind of like one of those superwomen,” he comments.
Chim notes that though she has technically been on leave, she has continued working part-time, doing some projects from home. She has been able to wrap up some matters that were pending before Brennan’s birth and work on sections of briefs for colleagues, she says.
The child, she explains, was named in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, and also for the name’s Irish flair.
During the coming year, Chim says, she plans to emphasize SCCLA’s traditional priorities: service to the community, service to members, and excellence and quality in everything it undertakes.
One area of ongoing work, she says, is legislation to prohibit the unauthorized practice of law. The group has worked with Assemblywoman Judy Chu, D-Monterey Park, on a package of bills targeting abuse by immigration consultants.
While some consultants are reputable, others prey on vulnerable members of Asian communities, especially in the San Gabriel Valley, Chim says.
SCCLA sponsors an event almost every other week, the president-elect observes. Last year it awarded $20,000 in scholarships to law students, it participates in “Blue Car” programs aimed at introducing high school students to legal concepts and the possibility of a career in law, and with the Chinatown Service Center it sponsors a holiday food drive that provides five days worth of groceries to over 250 needy families.
Networking activities aimed at career advancement for Asian American attorneys are another top priority, Chim asserts.
The “glass ceiling” for Asian Americans in the legal profession may have been “raised a little higher” in recent years, but it “shouldn’t even be there,” Chim declares.
Neither the bench, Congress, nor law firm partnerships adequately reflect the country’s Asian American population, she adds.
While she acknowledges progress, she says it has not been fast enough or gone far enough.
“Somehow we’re still not there,” she says.
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company