Posts from the WSBA President
WSBA President Francis Adewale and Executive Director Terra Nevitt issue a call for reunification around what binds legal professionals and our communities. In the brief interview that follows Adewale and Nevitt explain why they wrote their statement on immigration enforcement, what they hope to accomplish alongside other Washington legal professionals, and what all legal professionals can do.
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October changes are abundant. Foliage transforming. Air crisping. Lattes pumpkin-spicing.
At the WSBA, the autumnal transition also signifies the annual changing of the guard on the Board of Governors. With the start of the new fiscal year in October, those governors who finished their terms welcome their replacements, and new Board officers assume their roles in the seats of president, president-elect, outgoing president, and treasurer.
It’s all highlighted in Washington State Bar News—this year, there is even a change to note in that regard.
Have you ever started a role knowing you have huge shoes to fill? For the last year, I served alongside our 2022-2023 WSBA President Dan Clark. As I step into the role as the 2023-2024 WSBA president, I feel like a small child trying on their parent’s shoes and clomping awkwardly around the room.
The WSBA membership has been extraordinarily well-served by Dan in his various leadership roles within the organization. Dan is believed to be the longest-serving member of the Board of Governors (ever), the first WSBA Treasurer to be reelected to that role (ever), and the first WSBA president with a speaking disability (ever). Indeed, Dan is believed to be the first state bar association president in the United States with a speaking disability—you guessed it … ever.
Very little about the trial against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is standard. The mere fact that there is a trial is somewhat unusual. Police-involved deaths rarely result in prosecutions, let alone convictions of the officers involved. (Despite about 1,000 police-involved deaths per year, since 2015 only 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter resulting in 44 convictions, according to the New York Times.) Few police-involved deaths are as widely well-known as the summer day in 2020 and the now-infamous video showing Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, ending in Floyd’s death. And certainly, never before has such an intensely high-profile criminal case taken place amid the unprecedented courtroom restrictions to amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
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In September, the WSBA hosted a panel entitled “Women, Race and Age: Mitigating Misogyny and Bias in the Legal Profession.” We (Robin Haynes and Linda Fang) were panelists, along with Elaine Edralin Pascua and Onik’a Gilliam. In an effort to continue the conversation, we wanted to share our takeaways from the panel and encourage readers […]
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Meet your new president, president-elect, and governors in the October 2016 issue of NWLawyer! Take a look at the featured articles below or read the full issue online.
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On June 1, WSBA Executive Director Paula Littlewood and I, WSBA President Bill Hyslop, will begin the 2016 WSBA Listening Tour. We’ll spend time with members in Bellevue, Moses Lake, Tri-Cities, Walla Walla, Pullman, and Spokane. Together these stops encompass the East King, Grant, Benton-Franklin, Walla Walla, Whitman, and Spokane county bars.
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I normally use my blog posts to discuss and expand on my guest writers and the topics they are discussing. However, the June article that Barb Rhoads-Weaver and I co-wrote in NWLawyer prompted a couple of letters to the editor that I would like to respond to instead.
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In the President’s Corner of the June 2015 issue of NWLawyer, Barb Rhoades Weaver and I wrote an article on transgender awareness. Usually I post to this blog with reflections on my guest writers. Since I was a co-author for that particular article, I instead want to focus on another article in our June issue […]
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In the President’s Corner of the April/May 2015 issue of NWLawyer, Nicole McGrath discussed issues of equity in education, and how awareness of certain issues in how we handle race, poverty, and education in policy has a big impact on the lives of children.
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In the March 2015 issue of NWLawyer, there are two articles focused on cultural competency. The first is my guest writer for the President’s Corner, Francis Adewale, and the second, called “Know Thy Client,” is by Sims Weymuller.
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Reviewing the recent article by Elijah Forde from the February Issue of NW Lawyer served as a good reminder that cultural competency never requires us to ignore race, color, or origin. Cultural competency saves us from the traps of treating others as if their color and origin do not exist – which at best is […]
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The recent articles by Naoko Inoue Shatz and Qing Qing Miao from the December 2014/January 2015 issue of NWLawyer served as a good reminder that cultural competence is about more than race and country of origin. Both articles talked about cultural issues in doing business with Japan and China, but they also stressed the importance […]
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June flew by! I thought I would take a few minutes to give you an update on the highlights of the month. The month began with our Board of Governors meeting at the WSBA conference center. I am happy to report to you that we had more members watching online then we have ever had before. […]
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My President’s Column for the March issue of NWLawyer asks you to sit back a moment and think about what benefits you would like the WSBA to provide. Imagine for a minute if you owned this Bar. What benefits would you like to offer and receive? Obviously none of us own the Bar, but we are […]
Read More… I thought I would take a moment to update you on highlights of events around the bar.
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