The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association will honor Crowell & Moring partner Kathy Hirata Chin as a recipient of its prestigious 2022 Daniel K. Inouye Trailblazer Award.
This lifetime achievement award and NAPABA’s highest honor recognizes the outstanding achievements, commitment, and leadership of lawyers, community advocates, and organizations who have paved the way for the advancement of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) attorneys. NAPABA’s individual trailblazers have demonstrated vision, courage, and tenacity in their practice. They have also made substantial and lasting contributions to the AAPI legal profession, as well as the broader AAPI community.
Chin will receive this award on November 4 at the President and Trailblazer Awards Reception, which is taking place during NAPABA’s 2022 Annual Convention in Las Vegas. NAPABA is the largest Asian Pacific American membership organization in the nation, representing 60,000 attorneys, judges, law professors, and law students.
Chin is a member of the health care and litigation practice groups at Crowell. She has successfully represented individual health care providers and associations of such providers in challenges to actions taken by state and federal agencies, including multiple suits regarding Medicaid reimbursement issues, and in a variety of matters in state and federal court involving issues ranging from RICO claims based on allegedly fraudulent billing to FLSA disputes.
Throughout her career, Chin has worked toward the improvement and enhancement of the court system and the legal profession, and the ability of both to better serve the community. She has served on judicial screening committees, a judicial task force to explore gender bias, a commission to promote public confidence in judicial elections, and on the board of directors of bar associations and of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. She currently serves on the Attorney Emeritus Advisory Council and the Commercial Division Advisory Council, on the Second Circuit Judicial Council Committee on Civic Education & Public Engagement, and as the Acting Chair of the New York City Commission to Combat Police Corruption. She is also Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Medicare Rights Center, a national non-profit organization dedicated to helping older adults and people with disabilities get affordable health care. With a team of lawyers and judges from the Asian American Bar Association of New York, she and her husband have developed and presented a series of historic trial reenactments before audiences that have included not only law firms and bar associations, but the EEOC, the New York Historical Society, the New York City Law Department, law schools, colleges, and public school children. She has received the New York City Bar’s Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award, AABANY’s Women’s Leadership Award and the inaugural Hong Yen Chang awards from Columbia APALSA and Columbia Law School Association.
