Dear NLD,
Thank you for your continued readership and support of For the Record!
We strive to give a voice to the needs and experiences of the NLD community. To that end, we polled our members last month on their experiences with civility as new lawyers in the profession. SDCBA President Renée Stackhouse discusses these issues in greater depth and provides tips to deal with “less than” moments in the current edition of For the Record.
The survey results speak to the general integrity of our legal profession. At the same time, as in any profession, the survey results showed that attorneys do not always act perfectly towards one another regardless of their level of experience. For NLD members who are starting out on their road to establishing their competency and credibility, these types of communicative missteps can understandably feel daunting. This serves as a reminder for all attorneys to commit ourselves to the highest standard of civility and to consider the tone and impact of our words before saying them. We NLD members can remember to hold ourselves in stride, to look for a work culture that is consistently supportive and collaborative, and to whenever possible utilize less-than-civil moments with other attorneys as teaching tools rather than as attacks on our character or competence.
For the Record also endeavors to keep the NLD community up to date on the current state of the law, provide practice tips from judges and attorneys of all levels of experience, and highlight the achievements and diversity of our NLD membership and the bar at large.
Coming up on June 19 is Juneteenth, also known as “Emancipation Day,” which celebrates the emancipation of those who were enslaved in the United States. The holiday is celebrated annually across the nation in honor of June 19, 1865, when Texas Major General Gordon Granger formally declared the end of slavery in Texas, where slaveholding continued to persist for more than two years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862.
Juneteenth serves as a reminder that maintaining equality in our legal system and in our communities requires our ongoing commitment to justice, and that we as a society cannot become complacent in the advances that have thus far been achieved.
Retired judge Randa Trapp, recently honored as the SDCBA’s Outstanding Jurist of 2021, shines in her lifelong advocacy for minorities and people of color, as well as her other contributions to the bench and the bar over the past 35 years. In this month’s Tips from the Bench, she reminds us all of the importance of standing up for important issues and not allowing underrepresented individuals to fall through the cracks.
Ashley Fasano, featured in this month’s NLD Member Spotlight, is instrumental to helping transgender individuals gain access to the legal system through her involvement with USD Law School’s Transgender Name and Gender-Marker Change Clinic. Read the Member Spotlight to learn more about Ashley and how you can participate in a volunteer collaboration between NLD and the clinic.
We also hope to see you at our upcoming events this summer! Register now for our Virtual Summertime Potluck Celebration on July 15. We are also excited about our Court Practice Series, which starts in August, and the SDCBA’s Summer Social on August 19. More information on these two events will come in the following weeks. Don’t miss out on any of our updates by following the NLD on our website, Facebook page, and LinkedIn page.
We are always looking for new voices to feature in For the Record; article ideas can be sent to me directly at sara@eastmanip.com.
Cheers to a great summer with the NLD and the SDCBA!
Sara Gold
Editor-in-Chief