Norristown Attorney Named President of MBA

Donald J. Martin, Esq., a sole practitioner and Pennsylvania legal consultant who practices in Norristown, was installed as the MBA’s 88^th President at a ceremony at the Meadowlands Country Club in Blue Bell Jan. 13.

Martin has practiced in the fields of civil, criminal and administrative litigation since 1973. He received his BA in 1970 from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD in 1973 from the University of Chicago Law School. Since 1979, he has limited his practice to appellate matters, motions and providing assistance to other attorneys in the preparation and trial of complex cases.

Martin served the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas as its law clerk for asbestos litigation beginning in 1981, has been law clerk to all Montgomery County Senior Judges since 1998, and was appointed law clerk for complex litigation in 2002. He continues to serve in those areas as an appointed judicial officer.

Martin is a member of the Montgomery, Pennsylvania and American Bar Associations and the Montgomery County Trial Lawyers Section. He served as a director of the Montgomery Bar Association from 1986 to 1989, as its secretary in 2008, its treasurer in 2009, its vice president in 2010, and president-elect in 2011. He has been a member of the House of Delegates of the Pennsylvania Bar Association since 2001. He was also chair of the Solo and Small Firm Practice Section of the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) from 2002 to 2004.

Martin's series of articles "Preserving Issues for Appeal" has appeared in the PBA Solo and Small Firm Practice Section News, and he is co-author of Chapter 7, "Appeals" in Gerhard, Pennsylvania Medicaid: Nursing Home Care. Beyond his professional accolades and his popularity among members for his quick wit, the openly gay Martin has been as long-time champion of the association’s diversity efforts.

"Perhaps [becoming president] wasn’t something I thought about from the time I became a lawyer," Martin recently told the Philadelphia Gay News. "But it was always a possibility. It never occurred to me that being gay would stand in the way of anything I wanted to do.”

Martin received the ceremonial gavel from outgoing president, the Honorable Carolyn T. Carluccio – the organization’s first sitting judge to serve the top officer position since the association was founded back in 1885. The position is a volunteer one and Martin will reportedly only be compensated for food, travel and lodging expenses incurred in the performance of his duties.