Wanting to Talk About It

When he was in second grade, Mark Robertson was walking with his father in downtown Kansas City when they witnessed a bus crash into a car. In the aftermath, his father, a Methodist minister, gave his card to the car’s driver. When Robertson asked why, his father responded: “There are people who do bad things to others because of the color of their skin.”

The car’s driver was Black, Robertson remembers. “I grew up with a sense of social justice,” he says.

Robertson, a business litigator at Norton Rose Fulbright who handles antitrust, consumer protection, and breach of contract cases, follows his father’s example with a vigorous pro bono practice on behalf of the LGBTQ community.

As co-chair of his firm’s Pride Network, he has led the effort to develop an inclusive workplace environment, including recruiting and retaining LGBTQ law students. He also served on the New York City Bar Association’s LGBTQ Rights Committee and chaired the LGBTQ+ Pride Reception & Arthur S. Leonard Award Ceremony. Numerous times he’s been named to Crain’s list of Notable LGBTQ+ Leaders for his efforts.

He admits he didn’t seek out LGBTQ legal work at first.

“I had been a volunteer—not necessarily as a lawyer, but sometimes they put you on boards because you’re a lawyer,” Robertson says. “I have been on boards that had some kind of gay focus since about 1996 or ‘97,” when he was working in the firm’s Houston offices. When he moved to New York, he served on the board of Queens Legal Services. “That is the largest provider of legal services for low-income residents of Queens, and a component includes gay issues.”

Of his pro bono work over the past seven years, one of his most noteworthy cases involved securing the right for Presbyterian ministers nationwide to marry their same-sex partners.

“Many denominations have an ecclesiastical court system,” he says. “I’m Presbyterian, and I was asked by the pastor of my church if I would represent a minister who was about to be voted out of her church in New Jersey”—because she was gay and wanted to get married. Robertson argued that the existing laws and constitution of the Presbyterian Church USA did not prohibit pastors from marrying a same-sex partner.

“They had a trial to defrock her, and we won,” he says. “It was appealed to an intermediate appellate court of the church, and we won. Then we won at the national level—a kind of supreme court of the church—which made it OK for clergy in the church to marry a same-sex partner.”

When his client moved on to a new church, she invited Robertson to read scripture at the welcoming ceremony. “She introduced me to lots of her friends and colleagues, and she teared up and said, ‘I couldn’t be here without Mark’s legal brilliance’—which is overstated but true. I handle cases worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and this doesn’t have dollar value on it but it’s really the most important.”

I handle cases worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars … but [this case is] really the most important.

His father, he adds, was proud of him. “He met the woman pastor I repped. They talked clergy stuff,” he says with a laugh.

In other pro bono work, he’s helped immigrant adults and children gain asylum to prevent returning to countries where they would in danger for being LGBTQ. “Those are really quite heartwarming,” he says.

Within the firm, Robertson has worked to increase the visibility of the LGBTQ community. Every June he sets up a different program. One year featured a talk by a transgender woman; in another, gay men who lived in the city in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, were interviewed in front of about 400 people at the firm, and even “the old straight guys, as they called themselves, sat around talking about it,” Robertson remembers.

He also holds summer events with LGBTQ associates and students, and the Pride group teaches recruiters how to talk to students.

“Part of that is not to be afraid to talk about it,” he says. “If it’s on their resume, they want to talk about it.”