John Wester Wins Ayscue Professionalism Award

John R. Wester of Robinson Bradshaw is the 2025 recipient of the Mecklenburg Bar Foundation’s Ayscue Professionalism Award. The annual award recognizes an attorney who displays exemplary professionalism through service to the Bar and the greater community, and embodies the profession’s aspirational traits of “high ethical standards, model conduct, unquestioned integrity and consistent competence.”

Wester tries cases and argues appeals in complex civil litigation cases and class actions in federal and state courts, including extensive experience in the North Carolina Business Court.

He has served as lead counsel in noteworthy cases reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, including Hyatt v. Shalala, an 18-year pro bono case in which Wester and his colleagues won new disability hearings under new standards for a class of 150,000 North Carolinians. As the Court observed:

“Plaintiffs have effected fundamental change to a recalcitrant agency which brought all of the power of the federal government to bear on Plaintiffs and their counsel while it resisted Plaintiffs’ efforts to enforce the orders of this court each step of the way.”

Outside his wheelhouse of business litigation, Wester brings and defends cases advancing constitutional issues, including on behalf of four North Carolina governors.

Wester was president of the North Carolina Bar Association from 2009-10 and North Carolina chair of the American College of Trial Lawyers from 2004-06.

Wester is a devoted advocate for an independent judiciary, including serving as the inaugural chair of the American College of Trial Lawyers’ Committee for Judicial Independence. His community and board service includes Legal Aid of North Carolina, Public Ed Works, Duke Law’s Bolch Judicial Institute Leadership Council and the Lynnwood Foundation.

He has received the North Carolina Bar Association Litigation Section’s Advocate’s Award, the North Carolina State Bar’s John B. McMillan Distinguished Service Award and Duke Law’s Charles S. Rhyne Award for Professional Achievement. Wester is the fourth Robinson Bradshaw attorney to receive the Ayscue Professionalism Award since it was first given in 2004, joining colleagues Russell M. Robinson II (’06), Robert C. Sink (’14) and A. Ward McKeithen (’16).

Wester attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar before earning his law degree with high honors from Duke University, where he was an editor of the Duke Law Journal and inducted into the Order of the Coif.