Joanne Martin is a former Executive Director of the American Bar Endowment (ABE) and a former Associate Director of the American Bar Foundation (ABF), among other positions she held with the American Bar Association (ABA) and its associated organizations. Martin started at the ABA in the editorial department in 1973, where she worked with the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. She moved to the ABF in 1981, first serving as the Assistant Director and later as the Associate Director. During her tenure at the ABF her research interests included access to justice, legal needs, delivery of legal services, access to civil justice, and legal education. Martin also conducted surveys on judges, merit selection, the teaching of property law, and other topics with many ABA groups.
She and colleague Stephen Daniels are coauthors of two books: Tort Reform, Plaintiffs Lawyers and Access to Justice (University Press of Kansas, 2015) and Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform (Northwestern University Press, 1995). She is also author or coauthor of many articles on jury verdicts and plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Martin has made numerous presentations to state Fellows meetings. She became a Fellow of the ABF in 1985 and a Life Fellow in 1995. Martin later moved to the ABE, ultimately serving as its Executive Director beginning in 2016. She was only the 4th person to hold this position in the organization’s eighty-year history.
Martin is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Bar Association, the Illinois Bar Association, and the Chicago Bar Association.
