Jentes and Bogaard named as 2017 recipients of U-M?Law Distinguished Alumni awards

By Jordan Poll
U-M Law School

Michigan Law named William Jentes, ’56, and William Bogaard, ’65, recipients of the 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award, the Law School’s highest honor. “To receive the Distinguished Alumni Award at a place like Michigan Law, which is full of talented alumni, is a remarkable accomplishment,” said Dean Mark West. “There is no doubt that this year’s honorees earned their place among the Law School’s list of Distinguished Alumni Award winners.”

For close to 40 years, Jentes was a principal litigating partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, acting as lead trial and appellate counsel in many of the firm's most significant business, commercial, competition, and corporate cases. He retired from Kirkland in 2004 to establish an independent practice as an arbitrator and mediator of significant disputes, both in the United States and abroad.

Jentes, a civic leader and philanthropist in Chicago, has long been an active supporter of the Law School. He has been an adviser to numerous deans of the Law School, and taught at Michigan Law from 1991 to 2008. Jentes has served on fundraising committees during capital campaigns and championed the establishment of the Kirkland & Ellis Professorship, as well as a collective gift from Michigan Law partners at Kirkland & Ellis toward the recent campus expansion and renovation project. For nearly two decades, he funded the William Jentes Scholarship Fund, providing merit scholarship support to nine outstanding law students each year.

Jentes was presented with the Distinguished Alumni Award at a ceremony in Chicago in August. Among those in attendance were former recipients of the Jentes Scholarship.

Bogaard received the Distinguished Alumni Award during a ceremony held in Ann Arbor as part of the Law School’s Reunion Weekend.

After law school, Bogaard joined O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles and pursued a corporate securities law practice. He served as deputy commissioner of corporations for the State of California in 1966 and then returned to private law practice until the early 1980s. At the time, he joined First Interstate Bancorp, a financial services holding company, as executive vice president and general counsel.

Bogaard served as a visiting professor at Michigan Law from 1996 to 1997, where he taught Banking Law and Securities Regulation. He then taught Securities Regulation and Corporations as an adjunct law professor at the University of Southern California, while also pursuing an arbitration practice. In 1999, he became the mayor of Pasadena, California—the city’s first directly elected mayor, and went on to serve four four-year terms.