After Results at Donor Drive, ABA Section May Be Out for More Blood Next Year
A handful of lawyers helped save more than 80 lives on Friday during the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
There was no particular drama in what they did to save all those lives, but that made their actions no less important. And the only thing they had to fear—or at least some of them—was the needle.
What the lawyers did was give blood—about a pint each—at a drive sponsored by the Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section. And the American Red Cross, which collected blood from 24 donors and tested them as possible marrow donors, estimates that each pint of blood collected helps save at least three lives.
Almost all the donors were TIPS members, since the collection center was set up in a room tucked away two floors below the lobby of the section’s headquarters hotel. And the total number of donors fell just a bit short of the target set for the drive.
Still, the organizers of the event—apparently the first blood drive ever conducted during an ABA Annual Meeting—were encouraged by the results.
The blood drive was organized by Alyssa Ehrlich, a liaison from the Young Lawyers Division to the Law and Public Service Committee in TIPS. She credited Michael Daley, a TIPS member from the Boston area, for giving her the idea after he was tested—successfully—as a possible marrow transplant match.
“I’d love to challenge all the other sections and divisions to have blood drives in the future,” said Ehrlich, an attorney in San Diego.
The Public Service Committee jumped at the idea when Ehrlich suggested it, said Melody Wilkinson, a state trial court judge in Fort Worth, Texas, who chairs the committee. Wilkinson spent most of Friday morning psyching herself up to make her first blood donation ever after building up some nutritional resources at a luncheon.
Most of the lawyers who showed up during the morning appeared to be veterans of the process. Roshan Rajkumar, an attorney at Bowman & Brooke in Minneapolis, was busy working his BlackBerry while reclining on a medical table as a technician poked a needle into his arm. Some of his texts were trying to round up other donors, including one friend who said she would come to donate for the first time if he came and got her.
But to Rajkumar, a regular donor, giving blood is no big deal. “It’s a little thing you can do to help save lives, which is huge,” he said.
