WASHINGTON, DC (October 5) – Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton announced today that partner David C. Smith is a featured speaker at the 25th Annual Indian Land Consolidation Symposium on October 7, 2015, at the Umatilla Reservation in Pendleton, Oregon.

Mr. Smith will be speaking on the continued need for reform of the federal government’s management of the individual Indian trust as evidenced by administration of the Cobell settlement. Additionally, the Symposium will honor Helen Mitchell Sanders for her longtime service to Indian Country. For more information on the symposium, please click here.

Mr. Smith represents individual Indians and Tribes in major litigation around the country. He serves as Class Counsel in the representation of approximately 500,000 individual Indians in Cobell v. Jewell, a class action against the United States arising out of the mismanagement of the individual Indian Trust, which resulted in a $3.4 billion settlement, the largest class action settlement against the federal government.

For the past several years, Mr. Smith has been working with tribal governments, allottee associations and government agencies in seeking to locate the approximate 500,000 trust beneficiaries identified in the Department of Interior’s records as entitled to funds under that settlement. More recently, he defended the Poarch Band of Creek Indians before the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from efforts by Alabama to subject its tribal lands to state authority, and in July 2015, successfully obtained an order from the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Alabama enjoining a tax assessor from assessing tribal lands.

Mr. Smith is an adjunct professor at Notre Dame University School of Law in South Bend, Indiana, and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he teaches Federal Indian Law.

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