Firm Founder — Kristin Alice Kutz
Kristin Alice Kutz was born on December 26, 1952. She grew up with her parents, Adolph and Alice, and her two sisters, Kathryn and Karol, and attended school in Sacramento, California and Ankara, Turkey. Kristin attended Occidental College in Los Angles, and the University of California at Berkeley, earning a BA in English from Occidental in 1975. In 1975, Kristin joined the Yale Law School class of 1978, where she represented clients through New Haven legal services as part of the law school clinical education program. At Yale, Kristin served on the student advisory board for all of Yale’s clinical legal education programs. In 1978 Kristin married fellow law student William Bethke and the couple took jobs with Rural Legal Services of Tennessee, where Kristin worked as a staff and managing attorney from 1978 to 1981.
After moving to Denver, Colorado, from 1981 to 1996, Kristin worked with Brauer & Buescher as an associate, representing employees and labor unions, and with the Legal Center Serving Persons with Disabilities as a supervising staff attorney. In 1996, Kristin and her husband opened the law firm of Kutz & Bethke. Kristin retired in 2019.
Kristin was a member and chair of the Governor’s Advisory Committee For Service Standards/Regulations pursuant to C.R.S. 27-10-129 (ca. 1993-98); and a member of the board of directors of the CHARG Resource Center (2003-2006). Kristin served on several other nonprofit and professional committees, especially those working with people with disabilities. Kristin participated in a broad range of disability-related work but was particularly known for her representation of parents in special education matters and her representation of people subject to orders of civil commitment or involuntary administration of medication based, in part, on their disabilities. She received awards for her service to the disability community from the Arc of Denver (2004) and the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition (Kutz & Bethke, 1999). She participated in briefing, often for amicus curiae, a number of significant disability law cases in Colorado state and federal courts. Kristin joined her partner William Bethke in supporting the early development of the charter school movement in Colorado and supported the firm’s work with charter schools.
Kristin passed away after a long struggle with multiple illnesses on November 29, 2024.