Speakers

Lee Yeakel was a United States District Judge for the Western District of Texas. He was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate in 2003.

 

Before becoming a federal judge, he served as Chief Justice and Justice of Texas’s Third Court of Appeals and was in private practice in Austin, where he has spent his entire legal career. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Laws degree from the University of Virginia. The Texas Bar Foundation awarded him the 2012 Samuel J. Pessara Outstanding Jurist Award. The University of Texas Law School’s Review of Litigation named him the 2014 Outstanding Texas Jurist. He is a sustaining life fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the American Law Institute.

 

The Honorable Lee Yeakel Intellectual Property American Inn of Court is named in his honor. He presently serves as a Texas commissioner to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Recently he served as a member of the United States delegation to the Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters and was a signer for the United States of the treaty that resulted from the convention.

 

Yeakel is a former president of the Rotary Club of Austin. He and his wife Anne have two children and three grandchildren.