Who We've Lost To COVID-19

A woman whose faith informed her lawyering, who always made time for her low-income clients. A talented public servant who was a father figure not just to his adopted son, but to the many lawyers he mentored in the Washington, D.C., attorney general's office. A charming liability attorney who came out as gay late in life, and was making the most of his "second act."

Since February, the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 355,000 Americans, including many members of the legal community. Their careers and lives varied, from small firm attorneys trying to offer services in their communities, to career public servants, to legends of the plaintiffs' bar like Stephen Susman.

Regardless of who they were, their absence is felt by the attorneys they worked with and mentored, and their contributions to the bar will live on.

While it's impossible to honor all the lives lost to the virus, here are the stories of a few of the attorneys who died of COVID-19.

George Valentine

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser took a deep breath before beginning a March press conference intended to focus on the district's plan for the upcoming election.

Moments before the event was scheduled to begin, she'd learned "some very difficult news": George Valentine, deputy director of the mayor's Office of Legal Counsel, had died of COVID-19.

"It's devastating for everybody," she said at the press conference when asked how she and her staff took the news. "We just are very sorry."

Valentine was a career public servant, and according to those who knew him, he was a hard-working, generous and brilliant attorney. After receiving his law degree from Harvard Law School, he worked for 16 years at the D.C. attorney general's office leading its civil litigation division. He started work in the mayor's office about two years before his death.

As a boss, he could be both tough and warm, according to Darrell Chambers, who worked as a line attorney and then a section chief in the attorney general's office under Valentine.

"He certainly got every ounce of potential out of folks," he said. "He was a master motivator. He didn't bunker down in his office — he walked the halls."

Onye Chinwah, who'd worked as a law clerk and then as an assistant attorney general under Valentine, considered him a mentor. The two kept in touch and were neighbors, and Valentine advised Chinwah when he started his own plaintiff-side employment litigation firm.

"His advice was invaluable. I was always able to get from him some strategy that would help," Chinwah said. "He brought an immeasurable body of knowledge to the table. There wasn't an issue that George Valentine had never seen."

Chambers remembered Valentine guiding him through one case that was "really sticky" because it was so political.

A D.C. teacher claimed he'd been fired because he'd sent an email criticizing school staff and complaining he'd been told to falsify student test scores. The school system countered that his termination was based on his performance. The suit named the mayor and the former school chancellor as defendants, and the attorney general's office represented them.

When their motion to dismiss was denied, Chambers said, it rankled top officials who likely raged at Valentine.

"George, I'm sure, gets it. Like, 'What are you doing down there? Your people don't know what they're doing,'" Chambers said.

But Valentine never let it show. He called Chambers into his office and they discussed the case.

"He comes up with some really, really good creative arguments, and ways to reargue the motion to dismiss in a different procedural posture, so that the court doesn't say, 'Idiot, I just told you, you don't get this,'" Chambers said. "When the stuff hit the fan and came back down, George said, 'OK, let's try this.' And it worked."

The district won on that motion for judgment on the pleadings, which argued the teacher's email was sent in an official capacity and was not protected by the First Amendment.

Valentine handled many difficult cases. He served in the attorney general's office while the district's child welfare system was still under a court-appointed monitor. In 2010, a federal judge held then-Mayor Adrian Fenty in contempt, finding children lingered in foster care without a stable family life, and that the government had failed to tackle a growing backlog of reported abuse.

"There were just systemic problems with [the Child and Family Services Agency] not taking kids out of homes, and kids being abused and neglected," Chambers said. "George spearheaded those cases for a long time. I think it had an impact on him. It helped drive him to want to get a child out of a bad situation."

Valentine became a foster parent to a teenager, and ended up adopting him. It was a bold choice — as children grow older, it's harder for them to find permanent and stable homes — but Chinwah said Valentine considered his son his legacy.

"It was one of the things he was most proud of," Chinwah said. "It wasn't always easy, but he stuck it through. That was a very important project to him, to be a loving parent to his adoptive son."

The only thing Valentine couldn't seem to do was stop working, according to Chinwah.

"When he told me he was thinking of going to the mayor's office, my response was, 'Uh... aren't you going to retire?'" Chinwah recalled, laughing. "Like the true workaholic that he was, he found another job. He loved practicing law. He liked being near the action and he liked solving problems."

Richard Weber

There was a joke about Richard Weber among some of his colleagues at Gallo Vitucci Klar LLP: He was so fond of chatting that if you wanted to end a conversation with him, you had to walk away.

Steve Denburg, a partner at the firm, remembered that it wasn't enough to tell Weber that he had to finish his work — he'd have to get out of earshot.

"I would be walking away and Richard would still be talking. He'd be at his desk, sort of calling out as I was walking down the hall," Denburg said. "He was very chatty, and usually chuckling about something. He was always finding something fun and interesting to talk about."

Gregarious, charming and outgoing, Weber quickly won over his colleagues at Gallo Vitucci when he started there in 2013, focusing on general liability defense, premises liability and no-fault personal injury litigation. An avid collector, his Manhattan office was jam-packed with antiques and vintage books. But after he died from COVID-19 in March, it was cleared out.

Weber grew up in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Wake Forest University, a master's in political science from Drew University, and a law degree from the Seton Hall University School of Law. In 2001, he was elected to serve on the city council in Metuchen, New Jersey, and stepped down from that post nine years later, citing "personal reasons."

Weber was married for many years to Virginia Smith, and they had three children together before getting divorced. After that, he came out as gay.

He took great pride in his identity, and he joined the board of the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York, also known as LeGaL.

Weber became a board member at the organization and worked on its judiciary committee, vetting judicial candidates for competence and commitment to the LGBT community in the weeks leading up to New York state court elections.

Those meetings could be draining, lasting three hours at the end of a work day, according to Bill Crosby, who served on both the committee and the LeGaL board with Weber. But, Crosby said, having Weber there made it feel like less of a chore.

"Just being in his presence made it fun," he said.

Weber was also a strong supporter of a free health clinic in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, and wanted to expand that program to his native New Jersey, Crosby said. In November, LeGaL bestowed the Richard E. Weber Award for Outstanding Student Dedication to three law students in his honor, according to Crosby.

"Richard believed in equality and fairness for everyone and certainly not least of all, for groups he was a part of," he said. "The mission of LeGaL fit in with his sense of what lawyers should be doing, particularly LGBT lawyers."

As an attorney, Weber was a force. By the time he died, he had several hundred active cases, according to Marc Pottak, a second-year associate at Gallo Vitucci who had worked with Weber and managed his clients after he died.

"His caseload was astounding. I didn't quite realize how much he did until he passed," Pottak said. "He was a really sharp attorney. A lot of the no-fault cases he did were really nuanced stuff that involved conflict of law and out-of-state policies being construed by New York state court. He was respected by all the attorneys and judges who worked with him."

Weber was always friendly and gracious, even when dealing with difficult opposing counsel, Pottak said. He was dedicated to mentoring Pottak and to helping his clients, and continued to work from his hospital bed, advising Pottak on how to handle cases even the day before he died.

Taking on Weber's cases after he passed was daunting, Pottak said, because he had such big shoes to fill. But he never felt that he couldn't handle an issue that came up, because Weber had left behind a wealth of memorandum templates.

"He had this enormous library of work he's done because the volume of his work was so large and he'd been doing it for so long," Pottak said. "I honestly don't think I've come across any situation that I haven't been able to just pull something up and figure it out by looking at his work and then doing a little more research to make sure everything's still current and that the law still holds."

For months after Weber's death, Denburg had trouble believing he was really gone. He'd died at the age of 57, still having aspirations. He'd just taken the Florida bar exam, because many of his clients were based there. He hoped to be a civil court judge in New York. He'd found a loving partner, Antonio Shaw.

"He burned pretty bright as a person," Denburg said. "How can that be, that someone's so vibrant and full of life, and then really just in the blink of an eye, they're gone? This was his second act in life, being an out and proud gay man, and it was all the more sad that this second act got cut short."

Brenda Ravenell

Though she knew she wanted to be an attorney since she was in her early 20s, Brenda Ravenell had to work hard to achieve that goal.

She was saddled with student loan debt when she graduated from New York University in 1976, and the school wouldn't release her undergraduate transcript for her law school applications, according to her sister, Daneen Cooper. And so Ravenell worked for an insurance underwriter for a few years before she got into Rutgers Law School.

Then there was another challenge: She had to quit her job, move out of her place in Queens, and find a place to live in New Jersey.

But she made it work, never losing sight of her goal of helping people.

"She figured the best way to change lives, to have an impact, was to be an attorney, to right some of the injustices people have to deal with in life," Cooper said.

After graduating from law school in 1984, Ravenell worked for Legal Services of New Jersey, a civil legal aid organization based in Newark. But she found the work draining, her sister said.

In 1987, she applied to work for a small personal injury law firm run by Beverly Giscombe. She initially took on some personal injury work, Giscombe said, but "it became clear in the very beginning that she had a lot of compassion for people, and she preferred working in family law and landlord-tenant type cases."

"She had the unique ability to make people feel they were important to her," Giscombe said. "Sometimes I would have to say, 'Brenda, you're spending too much time talking to this person.' But she would really take her time to meet with people, to try to get the best results for them."

Her sister echoed this sentiment, saying that Ravenell would often "give her last to someone."

"She was caring to a fault," Cooper said. "That's what made Brenda Brenda."

Ravenell's desire to help people was driven by her faith. She was an active member of the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark, where she taught Sunday school. She also did some pro bono work with members of her church, her sister said, and saw "families being torn apart."

Her work at Giscombe's East Orange-based firm reflected her commitment, her sister said.

"They dealt with poor communities, communities of color. People who don't normally get help or assistance, that's who they were there for," Cooper said. "She could have made a lot more money if she had gone a different path, but she felt that that sacrifice was her commitment to the community."

In 2002, Giscombe made Ravenell a partner at the firm, and 15 years after that, Ravenell retired. Her health was failing due to diabetes. She had eye surgery and amputations, Giscombe said. When her kidneys began failing her two years ago, her daughter, the artist Adebunmi Gbadebo, gave one of hers.

When Ravenell died in April after contracting COVID-19, Giscombe said she couldn't believe it. She is still struggling to come to terms with it.

"It just seems to me so unfair. Brenda fought and survived all these surgeries, and then she gets taken out by the virus," she said. "I think about that often. It's really unfair she went through all of that, and still couldn't make it."

--Editing by Adam LoBelia.

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.