The Merianne Gaston Award for Excellence in Legal Support

This award recognizes a legal support professional whose conduct, commitment, and actions demonstrate extraordinary dedication to the legal profession. The award is named in honor of Merianne Gaston, who worked for over 30 years at the State Bar of Texas. She served the Texas Bar College from 2009 until her retirement in 2018, first as Managing Director and then as Executive Director. Merianne dedicated her entire career to promoting the importance of continuing legal education and improving the quality and content of the programing.

2024 Recipient – Tracy Nuckols

Tracy Nuckols
Director, Sections Department (Retired)
State Bar of Texas

Tracy spent the early years of her career as a law office administrator and paralegal specializing in several practice areas, including criminal law, civil litigation, family law, and estate planning, probate, and trust litigation. After approximately 15 years in this field, and feeling the need for a change, she decided to return to college to finish her degree. She put herself through school as a 911 police/fire/ambulance dispatcher and ultimately received her degrees from Texas State (previously Southwest Texas University) in Public Relations and Communications.

After graduating, she accepted a job as a Program Coordinator with TexasBarCLE, where she was mentored by Merianne Gaston, the original recipient of this award. Tracy spent the next 10 years planning her way through most of the courses at TexasBarCLE and developing strong relationships with lawyers from a wide variety of practice areas. Drawing on her legal background and creative talents, she worked with the top lawyers in each practice area to develop and implement the original breakout sessions for many of TexasBarCLE’s largest advanced courses (Advanced Real Estate, Advanced Criminal, Advanced Family, and Advanced Estate Planning and Probate) which are still in place today.

After a decade with TexasBarCLE, Tracy was promoted to Director of the State Bar’s Sections Department and tasked with reinventing and reinvigorating that department to provide more services and support to the 48 sections of the State Bar of Texas. With the help of some truly excellent staff support along the way, she implemented website and digital newsletter support, introduced an eblast system for section communications, began providing meeting planning and retreat support, and, drawing on her time at TexasBarCLE, helped the sections provide virtual and live CLE opportunities for their memberships. Tracy also worked with the Section Representatives to the Board Committee (whose members are elected by the Sections) to develop a friendly, but firm, external system of governance for State Bar Sections.

Tracy retired from the State Bar of Texas in July of 2023 and moved to Fort Worth. She is currently exploring her entrepreneurial inclinations, providing part-time administrative support for the Appellate Section, and generally looking forward to exploring the next chapter of her life.

Below is the Nomination Letter recommending Tracy for the Merianne Gaston Award for Excellence in Legal Support, which was written by Chad Baruch and signed by some of her biggest fans, and better outlines the reasons Tracy was chosen for this honor.

Past Recipients