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.

2021 Recipient – Jena Parker, CP

Jena Parker has over 27 years of experience as a criminal law paralegal.  Since 1997, Jena has been a certified paralegal through the National Association of Legal Assistants which the American Bar Association recognizes as a designation of her ability to provide exceptional paralegal services and marking a “high level of professional achievement” (www.nala.org). To maintain this highest level of national accreditation, Jena must fulfill ongoing educational requirements mandating a minimum of 50 hours of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) every 5 years.

In addition to her nationally recognized accreditation, Jena was on the board of the Texas Bar College for approximately 10 years and has been a member of the State Bar of Texas Paralegal Division for many years. Jena also joined the Fort Worth Paralegal Association (FWPA) in 1992, serving on its board for 6 years, receiving nominations for “Paralegal of the Year” each year from 2003-2006, and was elected President of the FWPA in 2005.  Jena’s “Paralegal Profile” has been featured in West’s Paralegal Today (Fourth edition, p 587), and she was featured in the popular paralegal reference guide Lessons from the Top Paralegal Experts: The 15 Most Successful Paralegals and What You Can Learn from Them by Carole Bruno.

Jena was featured in the documentary series Dallas DNA (Investigation Discovery Channel) for her work with the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU).  The CIU was the first of its kind in the United States, created to review claims of actual innocence by those convicted of serious crimes, remedy wrongful convictions, reaffirm proper ones, and lobby the legislature to pass laws to prevent wrongful convictions and minimize their impacts moving forward.  Jena was the CIU paralegal from its inception in 2007 through 2011 when she returned to the private sector.  In the subsequent years, the groundbreaking work done by Jena and her colleagues at the Dallas County CIU has been a model for successfully reviewing the integrity of convictions from within District Attorney’s Offices nationwide and, in some cases, overseas.

Jena currently works for renowned criminal defense attorneys Terri Moore and Mike Ware, and for the Innocence Project of Texas (where Mike is Executive Director), a non-profit organization that works to free the wrongfully convicted statewide and assists with corresponding efforts nationwide.

Past Recipients