Remembering Dale Harris
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 52 |
AROUND THE BAR PROFILES IN SUCCESS
BY GALE MILLER, ALAN LOEB, AND NEIL PECK
Extraordinary lawyer, professional and community leader, mentor, role model, and friend. These superlatives perfectly describe Dale Harris. All three of us were partners with Dale and were lucky enough to have worked with him on numerous cases and matters over more than three decades. We will never forget his warmth, wisdom, sense of humor, compassion, thoughtfulness, and decency.
A Life's Story
Let's first look at the facts, then we'll turn to his personal qualities that we value so greatly. When asked where he came from, Dale would respond in his best Southern Illinois drawl, "I was born in Crab Orchard, Illinois." He grew up in nearby Marion, where he met Toni, the love of his life. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of Colorado, initially on a basketball scholarship, and then an academic scholarship. Upon graduation, Dale and Toni married and headed off to Cambridge, where he attended Harvard Law School.
After graduation in 1962, they moved to Denver, and Dale started work at Lewis, Grant & Davis (now Davis Graham & Stubbs). Mentored by Donald Stubbs, Dale embarked on a brilliant 60-year practice, encompassing antitrust and other complex commercial litigation, trials, and appeals. He was nationally recognized as ahighly experienced and effective antitrust lawyer and was a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers. As a natural leader, he became the youngest managing partner in the history of Davis Graham & Stubbs up to that time, while maintaining a busy practice. In more recent years, as a member of the American Arbitration Association's National Roster of Arbitrators and Mediators, Dale handled more than 50 commercial arbitrations and was preparing for an arbitration hearing scheduled to begin the week after he died.[1]
Principled Leader
Dale's leadership in the profession was recognized early in his career, through election as president of the Denver Law Club (from which he later received its Lifetime Achievement Award) and of the Colorado Association of Corporate Counsel, which he and author Neil Peck founded Dale served as president of both the Colorado and Denver Bar Associations and received the Award of Merit from both associations, their highest awards for service to the legal profession. But the list of his leadership within the bar is much longer, including service as state chair of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation and of the US Supreme Court Historical Society; on the boards of the Legal Aid...
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