‘The Bow Tie Guy’

John McHugh stops mid-sentence to let out a warm, disarming laugh at his own expense before admitting he’d never given pro bono work much thought until the day in 2012 when two partners at Reilly Pozner came into his office. They were thinking about challenging Colorado’s ban on gay marriage, and asked if he could introduce them to anyone in the LGBTQ advocacy community.

McHugh, now a director at Fennemore, was a young associate then. He was also new to Colorado, having followed his husband to Denver from New York. His initial attraction to the law was more about earning potential than civil rights.

But the conversation sparked something in him. “I looked at them, and I said, ‘Sure, but that means that I’m going to do this case,’” he recalls. “And they agreed. They just turned the case over to me and said to run with it.”

It turned out that leading the litigation that legalized same-sex marriage in Colorado was, to echo a common McHugh refrain, “just so much fun.” It spurred him to keep fighting for the LGBTQ community, challenging such discriminatory practices as the Boy Scouts of America’s gay hiring ban and the state’s refusal to let transgender residents change their birth certificates without surgery. More recently, he represented Autumn Scardina, the woman denied a birthday cake in the high-profile follow-up to the Masterpiece Cakeshop discrimination case.

“He’s the go-to person that the community calls when there is indignity,” says Paula Greisen, who represented the gay couple in the original Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. She also served as co-counsel with McHugh on what she calls the “Cakeshop 2” trial, during which McHugh wore a shirt and bow tie every day that were pink or baby blue, the colors his client wanted on the cake she was told she could not have because of her gender identity.

“That’s John, unabashedly supporting the LGBTQ community down to the color of his bow tie,” Greisen says. “Working with John is a full life experience; it’s not just a legal argument. He has a ginormous heart.”

“He’s got a big heart, a big brain and a big personality,” says Dan Reilly, McHugh’s boss and mentor. “He’s the bow tie guy.”

McHugh wore a bow tie to his first interview with Reilly—and in every courtroom appearance since, except for one in April 2024 in which Reilly opted to forego his own signature trial accessory, his cowboy boots, for a case in Laramie, Wyoming. “I wore a tie for the first day or two,” McHugh says, adding that he thought it would be a safer choice in a new jurisdiction. “But then I went back to bow ties.”

“Jurors want you to be yourself, and if they think you’re not being yourself, you’ve lost them, so John was being himself,” Reilly says. “I think he might have been born with a bow tie, I don’t know. I never asked him that, but he doesn’t look like he’s trying to be somebody else when he wears it.”

Along with his “sartorial splendor,” Reilly says McHugh is a “brilliant and fearless trial lawyer” who is always ready to roll up his sleeves.

“John came from a farming community in Idaho,” he says. “He knows how to take on the hard jobs and how to complete them. With long jury trials, things happen. Documents you think you’d never see turn up, witnesses say things you never thought they’d say, and judges identify issues for the first time, and somebody’s got to dig in and pull the all-nighter to provide a brief to the judge, to help make sure that the witness is ready the next day. John is a prodigious worker, and that’s what he’s always done.”

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McHugh grew up on a modest ranch, one of seven siblings raised on a mail carrier’s salary in Idaho. He knew how to feed cows and care for pigs and even ostriches, but he didn’t know a single lawyer until his sister-in-law became one when he was already out of college.

He went to the University of Idaho with plans to become an English professor and ended up starting out in educational publishing at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, where he took on a second job teaching test prep for Kaplan.

“I’m bad at math, so I could only teach the English portion of the GRE, and they asked me to take the LSAT so that I could teach LSAT courses,” McHugh says. “That was the first time I actually considered being a lawyer, and I looked at it from a purely monetary view. I evaluated what I could make after three years of law school compared to what I would be making if I continued to work in educational publishing, and that became a no-brainer. So I applied to law schools.”

He was accepted to New York University’s School of Law, decided litigation was the best fit for his competitive personality, and landed at the international trial firm Quinn Emanuel. 

McHugh’s husband, Rob, however, was ready to leave New York City. “He actually moved out to Denver to take some continuing education,” McHugh says. “The plan was he was going to be out here a couple of months, and I think the second day he called me and he’s like, ‘I’m not moving back.’”

McHugh came to Reilly Pozner in November of 2011. He claims everything he knows about storytelling and the law comes from Reilly (they both went on to join Fennemore in 2021), but Reilly remembers it differently. He says McHugh was already a highly experienced trial lawyer by the time he arrived in Denver.

“John was the perfect person to lead that charge,” Reilly says of the same-sex marriage litigation. “It’s one of the things that I’m most proud of that our firm did.”

McHugh began by sitting down with his team and asking, “What is the story we want to tell? Who is the story?” They assembled a group of nine couples, 18 plaintiffs, to represent a wide variety of identities and experiences.

“We had people who had been together for decades, people who had been together for a couple years, people who had adopted children, people who had children through surrogacy, interracial couples, women couples and men couples,” he says. “What we wanted to evaluate is how do we tell the story of the harm. How do we tell the story—and this I think is what really resonated with a lot of judges—of what marriage means in our society. The number of federal laws that are implicated by

 marital status is mind-blowing. It’s everything from benefits like SNAP and housing assistance to taxes and inheritance laws. That actually was the issue in Windsor; it was about her rights on tax issues.”

In 2013’s United States v. Windsor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Lawsuits challenging state bans were soon filed across the country, including one in federal court in Colorado and the McHugh-led McDaniel-Miccio v. State of Colorado in state court. In McDaniel-Miccio, an Adams County District Court judge found the ban was invalid but also stayed his own ruling pending appeal.

While McHugh’s team geared up for that appeal, the decision finding Utah’s same-sex marriage ban invalid in Kitchen v. Herbert was affirmed at the 10th Circuit and then denied cert before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“When that happened, the AG’s office here decided that since Kitchen was going back, that was going to bind the entirety of the 10th Circuit, including Colorado, and they dropped the appeal of our case, and we ended up getting an order entered that the trial court order was the final order on it.”

Soon after that victory in 2014, McHugh represented Yasmin Cassini, a woman whose job offer from the Boy Scouts of America was rescinded when they learned she was gay. The case led the organization to change its discriminatory hiring policy. He also served on the board of the Colorado LGBTQ+ Bar Association and became its president in 2017.

Then, in 2018, he and Greisen teamed with Emma Shinn, a lawyer and now-retired Marine who is transgender, to file a lawsuit challenging Colorado’s policy of requiring gender-affirming surgery in order for someone to change the gender on their state identification. They argued the state was essentially forcing transgender residents to live a lie or have surgery.

“Shortly after we challenged it, the legislature started debating a change to the law and the AG’s office informed us that they had looked at the statute again and had decided that there really wasn’t a surgery requirement in the statute,” McHugh says. “They’d been requiring it for decades, and they just said, ‘You know what? We were wrong.’ So we got that resolved kind of amicably with them, and then within six months, the law changed.”

Greisen credits “the weight of John’s reputation” and his advocacy behind the scenes with that success.

“John was the craftsman in getting a resolution quickly and the right resolution,” she says. “It achieved the result without taking the many years it often takes for litigation to get resolved.”

In 2021, McHugh was brought into what was essentially a divorce case to argue before the Colorado Supreme Court on the issue of whether the state could recognize a same-sex common law marriage that predated the legalization of same-sex marriage.

“They ultimately said yes, the ban on same-sex marriage was always invalid,” McHugh says of the decision. “If it’s unconstitutional, it was never valid, and that was a big change and a good win.”

Most recently, in his lawsuit against Masterpiece Cakeshop, the trial court found, and Colorado Court of Appeals agreed, that the bakery had violated Colorado’s antidiscrimination law by refusing to make Autumn Scardina a blue and pink birthday cake once she shared that the colors reflected her identity as a transgender person. The case then went before the Colorado Supreme Court, which dismissed it on procedural grounds.

While that ruling was a disappointment, McHugh says the lessons that led to his successful outcome at trial apply broadly to the kinds of battles being waged now by what he describes as “evil law firms” seeking to undermine LGBTQ rights by challenging anti-discrimination laws.

“They can have all of the fancy theories about why the things that their client is doing is not discrimination, but if you actually take the deposition of their client, you frequently can cut through that pretty quickly,” McHugh says.

That was the goal—and the result, he would argue—of his deposition of the cakeshop owner.

“Based on his answers, it is clear that all of the legal arguments they were constructing were not consistent with what the actual decision-making process was,” McHugh says. “He would not make any cake that reflected somebody’s identity as a transgender person. He will not make anything that reflects anybody’s identity as an LGBTQ person, even if he would make an identical cake for somebody else. If that is not discrimination, I don’t know what is.

“In these kinds of spaces, people want to spend a lot of time talking about the law, and I think these cases are better driven by facts. It’s all about stories and getting people to understand the harm.”

Those are stories that McHugh plans to continue telling as he and Greisen strategize over what case they’ll take on next.

“John does give me a lot of hope that there will be people who continue to fight,” Greisen says. “That’s pretty courageous at a time where it’s easy to sit down and be quiet. I would say Fennemore is lucky to have him, but I think the fact that his law firm supports and continues to appreciate his work is also something to be praised. You’ve seen many law firms who have caved in fear of the kingmaking that seems to be going on, and John hasn’t. And the people who stand with him haven’t.”

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His pro bono work may get the biggest headlines, but McHugh says his full-time commercial litigation practice is equally exciting. He recounts trials like the Broncos ownership dispute in 2021, noting it was the first (and likely last) time his name will ever be mentioned in the tweets of sports writers.

“It was fun,” he says. 

So was the massive, months-long fraud trial over pre-need funeral contracts in federal court in Missouri that resulted in a $100 million verdict against PNC Bank.

“The funeral homes were selling these contracts, and the overarching company was a massive fraud,” he says. “They were taking these people’s money and spending it on cocaine and yachts. We represented a coalition of guaranty associations that protect the actual customers—basically trying to recover their money—and we got a nine-figure judgment against a bank because they turned a blind eye.”

Reilly says the case took two trials, 12 years and 50 lawyers. He recalls an important summary judgment hearing with more than a dozen lawyers and just as many clients in the courtroom as McHugh took the lead.

“It was a complicated question, and the judge was probing John both factually and legally, and I stood up to ask the judge if I could suggest something that I had thought of, and the judge looked at me and he said, ‘This is Mr. McHugh’s fish, Mr. Reilly. Please sit down.’ Everyone laughed. And John said, ‘I’d like to keep pursuing catching this fish, your honor. So what’s your question?’ It was fun, and exactly what needed to happen. John didn’t need my help. And the judge didn’t think he needed my help, either.”

Reilly also says McHugh is superb at playing the other side in mock trials and calling him out on any weakness.

“I’m not going to lie, I enjoy the conflict,” McHugh says. “It’s so much fun to get to work on these really complex matters. I really enjoy my job.”

What he enjoys most about it these days, he says, is working with young lawyers and paying forward the mentorship he received.

“I really don’t think I would still be an attorney if it weren’t for John,” says Amy Jones, an associate in her fourth year working with McHugh. “He’s always trying to include me and my ideas, which sounds like a pretty straightforward thing to do, but when you’re juggling a million things from a million cases, it’s actually really difficult to think about the most junior staff person on the case, but he always does that.”

In that Laramie trial, he finagled Jones a seat in the crowded judge’s chambers during arguments about jury instructions, even though they were being “hometowned” and made to look like the big, bad lawyers from Denver.

“We were conscious of optics and not appearing like we were absurdly heavily staffed, but it was really important to John that I see how the sausage is made, because I had spent a lot of time on the jury instructions,” Jones says.

Mallory Nordberg, who recently left Fennemore to move to Minnesota, says McHugh is the best mentor she’ll ever have, not just because he made her a better writer or spent hours helping her prepare for milestones like her first oral argument before the Colorado Court of Appeals, but because of the way he cared about his colleagues’ health and work-life balance.

“He was really good at saying, ‘It’s 4 o’clock. I’ve got to get my kid from school. I’ll talk to you later,’ and I think that was good to see as a young attorney,” she says. “When I was going through maternity leave, it was easy to talk to him, to ask questions, to ask why processes are the way they are, to ask if they could be better.”

Adds Jones: “He believes in me in a way that I couldn’t believe in myself. John has always approached my failures like, ‘Amy, we’re letting go of our mistakes and we’re rolling into the next thing.’”

He approaches setbacks and attacks on the LGBTQ community with that same resilience. Days before speaking with Super Lawyers for this story, he’d let himself yell at his computer for an hour and change during the oral arguments before SCOTUS in the Chiles v. Salazar conversion therapy case, for which he’d filed an amicus brief. Then he got back to work.

“That’s the passion and the intellect and the determination all rolled into one—that’s the essence of John,” Greisen says. “You either laugh or you cry—and sometimes we do cry—but John has the ability to maintain a sense of humor and keep his head held high.”

When he speaks to legal audiences about LGBTQ rights, McHugh says he’s often asked: What gives you hope?

“I love the question,” he says. “They always ask it to me at the end as a way to uplift the conversation, and it’s always the same answer. It’s the people fighting. It’s people going out and saying, ‘We are going to fight this thing. We are going to believe in the rule of law—even if certain people on high-powered courts don’t.’ I find it very heartening to see people fight.”