She specializes in personal injury and public entity defense. He's a dyed-in-the-wool plaintiff's lawyer. He sings her praises and claims she's too modest. She shushes him repeatedly, and without success.

Despite these superficial differences in professional focus and demeanor, Carol Wieckowski and Roger Dreyer have much in common, including their four children and their reputations as top drawer trial attorneys. And now they have something else to share: the 2002 SCBA Distinguished Lawyer Award.

Each year, the Distinguished Lawyer Award honors an SCBA member who through the practice of law has made Sacramento a better place to live and to work. The Bar Council named Wieckowski and Dreyer as joint recipients upon the recommendation of an awards committee appointed by SCBA President Mark Shusted. The award was based not only on the couple's professional accomplishments, but also on their impressive contributions to the community.

Wieckowski, a partner in Duncan, Ball & Evans, and Dreyer, a partner in Dreyer, Babich, Buccola & Callaham, did not start their legal careers intending to focus on community service. They were initially busy establishing their legal practices. But eventually, as their careers progressed and their family grew, they became more involved in the community.

"People like us, lawyers in their forties, need to get involved in the community. It's time to give back," Wieckowski said. "You're going to school in your twenties, you're establishing yourself in your thirties. By the time you're 40, you're a real lawyer, you're establishing a practice, and it is time to give back to the community."

By any measure, Wieckowski and Dreyer are giving back to their community with a vengeance. Much of that service involves helping children.

Wieckowski serves on the Board of Directors of St. Michael's Episcopal Day School, where she was the president of the parents club in 2001-2002, and co-chair of the school's capital campaign committee. For her efforts, St. Michael's awarded Wieckowski its Guardian Angel Award for 2002. She also serves as the secretary on the Board of Trustees of the Sacramento Theater Company. Wieckowski leads a Girl Scout Troop, serves as a Cub Scout Den Mother, and has served as a team mom for her children's soccer and baseball teams and as room mom for their various classes.

"She gives and gives and gives of her time and at the same time she's a practicing attorney. It's an amazing amount of effort," said Father Jesse Vaughan, headmaster of St. Michael's. "She's a worker. She rolls up her sleeves and puts in the work. No project is too demeaning for her, whether it is cleaning up an activity or setting up the activity."

Dreyer currently serves as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Child Abuse Prevention Council. The council is a nonprofit agency created by the Legislature and charged with the responsibility of training people who are mandated by law to report child abuse to law enforcement authorities. The council also develops programs designed to prevent child abuse and neglect.

In December, the council is scheduled to move its operations into a new North Highlands facility, the first permanent, fully owned facility that it has ever had. Sheila Anderson, the council's president and chief executive officer, said Dreyer was instrumental in the building's acquisition through his efforts in chairing the council's capital campaign and through the couple's personal generosity in the form of a lead gift.

Anderson said Dreyer "has been committed. He has been energetic. He has left no stone unturned in being an advocate for us."

In addition to Dreyer's work on the council, he has coached soccer and baseball teams each year since 1996. Dreyer served as a board member of the Mercy Foundation from 1995 to 1997.

Dreyer said his wife's involvement in public service prompted his own efforts. "I've watched my wife, who is very giving of her time and very unselfish," Dreyer said. "Seeing what she would do has been very much of a role model for me."

Dreyer was born in Panama. His father, Art Dreyer, the son of a Latvian Jewish immigrant, was a journalist for the U.S. Air Force. Wieckowski was raised as the oldest of seven children in a Polish Catholic family in the Bay Area. Each of their families, Dreyer said, had relatively modest financial resources. By contrast, he said, "Our kids have a very privileged existence, and we want them to know that their parents give back."

Although both Dreyer and Wieckowski attended UC Davis as undergraduates during the same years, they did not meet until they were law students at the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

During a joint interview in Dreyer's office, Dreyer and Wieckowski explained that their first encounter at Hastings began with a little misunderstanding.

"Really, the only reason she went out with me, and I am convinced of this, is when I introduced myself to her, she said, 'Dreyer, like the ice cream?'"

"And he said, 'Yes,'" Wieckowski recalled. "That's when you first could have been a plaintiff's attorney. Right there, you should have known your calling."

"It was true," Dreyer said. "It is 'Dreyer' like the ice cream. Now she thought I was saying yes like I was related to the Dreyers."

Dreyer kept the misunderstanding alive by arriving at Wieckowski's apartment for their first date with a large container of ice cream that he said was a gift from "Uncle George." "Because I knew if she knew who I was and that I had absolutely nothing that I would not be getting a date," Dreyer said with a laugh.

Only several dates later did Wieckowski learn that Dreyer was not related to the Bay Area ice cream company. "I said, 'No, I never told you I was related to the Dreyers that was an assumption you made,'" Dreyer said. "But by then she was smitten."

"Oh, brother," Wieckowski said, rolling her eyes.

Wieckowski graduated from Hastings in 1979. They got married after Dreyer graduated the following year. The couple did not begin their careers on different sides of the personal injury bar. After moving to Sacramento, Wieckowski began work for an insurance defense firm while Dreyer, who had a strong desire to do trial work, joined the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office.

Dreyer enjoyed trying cases as a deputy district attorney. Then Wade Thompson asked Dreyer whether he might consider joining Mort Friedman's firm, telling him that as a plaintiff's lawyer he would be a prosecutor for individuals. Another selling point was the promise that Dreyer would get the early opportunity to try cases, an opportunity that he felt he would not receive as an associate at an insurance defense firm.

In 1984, Dreyer and Thompson formed their own firm. Associates Bob Buccola and Joe Babich joined them soon thereafter. In 1987, Thompson and Dreyer split up, and Dreyer's firm was then known as Dreyer, Babich, and Buccola. The final named partner in Dreyer, Babich, Buccola & Callaham, William Callaham, joined the firm in the mid-1990s.

Dreyer's practice specializes in catastrophic injuries, wrongful death, public entity liability, general negligence and product liability. The Sacramento Consumer Attorney Association named him Advocate of the Year in 2001.

Meanwhile, Wieckowski became a partner in Duncan, Ball & Evans in 1990. She specializes in personal injury and public entity defense. Wieckowski is a member of the Association of Defense Counsel of Northern California.

Dreyer and Wieckowski are both active members of the Sacramento Valley Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. Dreyer is the 2002 president of the chapter while Wieckowski, the vice-president, is due to succeed him in 2003. The ABOTA chapter presented Dreyer with its Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for 2000.

Although their specialties make them potential adversaries, Wieckowski and Dreyer deny that their differing practices pose a problem. Although Wieckowski had to appear against her husband at a few conferences and hearings when they were both associates, she said, "That only happened a few times -- lucky for him."

Dreyer and Wieckowski said that dealing with their children, Evan, 14, Kelsey, 12, Natalie, 11, and Dylan, 9, and their various community activities keep them so busy that they have little time to talk about work at home. On a typical Saturday in October, for example, their four kids played in five games.

Even though their large family places substantial demands on their time, Wieckowski and Dreyer credit their kids for making them better members of the community and better lawyers.

"If you had met us 16 years ago, we weren't doing any of this (community service) stuff," Wieckowski said. "We were working, working, working, seven days a week, and we were having fun. We didn't know how we would fit in a kid. . . . We had no concept of how kids change your life."

Dreyer said that having children has shown him the special kind of love that parents have for their children, a love that he had not appreciated before having children even though he had represented parents of children who had been severely injured or killed.

"I am the lawyer I am today because I have children," he said. "The level of affection you feel for a child . . . is a different type of love."

Justice Daniel Kolkey chaired the blue ribbon committee that nominated Dreyer and Wieckowski for the Distinguished Attorney award. Judge James Long, Nancy Sheehan, Joseph Genshlea, and Ed Clifford served as members of the committee.

Congratulations to the 2002 SCBA Distinguished Lawyers!