Julianne P. Blanch, Shareholder at Parsons Behle & Latimer, has been honored with the 2025 Outstanding State Chair Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). Blanch will be recognized during the 69th Annual Fellows Awards Reception and Banquet, which will be held in Phoenix on February 1.
The Outstanding State Chair Award is given annually to an ABF Fellows State Chair who has demonstrated dedication to the work of the ABF and the mission of the Fellows through exceptional efforts at the state level. Blanch has exemplified this exceptional level of dedication in her leadership as Utah State Chair since 2018.
“It’s an honor to recognize Julianne P. Blanch with this award,” said ABF Fellows National Chair Frank Neuner. “Her leadership as Utah State Chair has been exemplary, and she is widely recognized as an accomplished legal professional. This award is a well-deserved attestation to Julianne’s commitment to the mission of the ABF Fellows and the principles of the legal profession.”
Blanch is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and serves as the Utah Chapter Committee’s Chair. She is a member of the Utah Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), an organization in which membership is considered only for those who have taken at least ten civil jury trials to verdict. She is also a member of the International Society of Barristers, an elite trial lawyer group into which only nine other lawyers in the state of Utah are members.
In her three decades of practice, Blanch has tried a broad range of cases involving many areas of the law, including trusts and estates, product liability, and bad faith insurance claims. Lately, her practice has focused on commercial litigation, fraud cases, and catastrophic personal injury cases.
Blanch was the chair for several years of the Utah Civil Jury Instructions Committee, which updated the civil jury instructions used in state and federal court trials. Blanch regularly presents at seminars for Utah Lawyers on the basics of litigation, jury selection, and trial techniques. She has also taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah.
Blanch has handled dozens of appeals on the state and federal levels. She has argued before the Utah Court of Appeals, the Utah Supreme Court, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. She also served for several years on the Utah Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Utah Rules of Appellate Procedure.
Blanch is the Tenth Circuit representative on the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary. This committee conducts independent peer evaluations of the professional qualifications of nominees to the federal bench.
“I remember when my law partner Fran Wikstrom walked into my office to urge me to accept the invitation to become an ABF Fellow,” said Blanch. “It was a big deal to him, and it was a big deal to another luminary of Parsons Behle & Latimer, James B. Lee, who devoted many years of service to the ABA. They valued that our chapter has members who are not just 9 to 5 lawyers—our members are, to borrow from the ABF Fellows website, ‘dedicated to the highest principles of the legal profession.’ It’s been an honor to lead this chapter, and it is an honor to receive this award.”
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.