Message from the Chair

David Lederman

The Executive Committee Year goes from Annual Meeting to Annual Meeting. My term as Committee Chair began in October of 2016 and will end with the Sections Convention mid-August, 2017 (although it will officially continue until the early September State Bar business meeting). Where has the year gone?

The Sections Convention:

We have three programs scheduled for the Sections Convention on August 18th and 19th in San Diego: “Recent Developments in Family Law” on Friday the 18th, “Private Judging: It’s Not the Wild West Anymore” (discussing recent developments and ethics in Private Judging) and “Frozen Military Pensions in a Blender” (discussing recent federal legislation significantly impacting the landscape of military pensions) on Friday the 19th. A special thanks to Steve Hittelman for pulling these programs together.

Webinars:

Webinars are announced on the section page of the State Bar website, through email blasts and in the Family Law News Monthly. In June alone, we have three webinars scheduled: “The Effective Use of Evidence Code Section 622 in Family Law Proceedings,” featuring the Hon. Maren E. Nelson; “Military Divorce: Support and Retirement”; and “Cultural Competency in Family Law Practice: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.” A special thanks to Abbas Hadjian, webinar guru extraordinaire, and his apprentice Leena Hingnikar, for all of their hard work pulling together and putting on these webinars.

Family Law Essentials:

This was the fifth and last year the State Bar Family Law Sections put on the Family Law Essentials program. This year’s program was “Bridging the Well: Ethics and Practice in Family Law Today.” This year’s program offered scholarships to legal services attorneys as part of our outreach efforts, and it was widely well received. We had an amazing faculty of Judges Mark Juhas, Sue Alexander, Maureen Hallahan, and Dale Wells. Our esteemed judicial panel was joined by attorneys Barbara Hammers and Garrett Dailey. This special program was only possible thanks to the Herculean efforts of Sherry Peterson, Melinda Sammis, and Renee Fairbanks. Thank you for all of your hard work.

Family Law News Monthly (FLNM):

As we transition from being a part of the California State Bar, which has taken a lot of our bandwidth and resources, the Family Law News team still pushed forward to modernize and invigorate our newly- dubbed Family Law News Monthly. FLNM will continue to provide timely family law news, including Dawn Gray’s new case summaries and low-cost self-study CLE. I will continue to use FLNM to provide up-to-date information on the state of the Section. Thank you to Jason Elter, who was recently elected Section Secretary for 2018, for serving as publisher, Steven Hamilton, and Dawn Gray for serving on the editorial board, and Naghmeh Bashir and Renee Fairbanks for their self-study efforts.

Beyond news and education, your Family Law Section has a major impact on developing and proposed legislation. Keep an eye on FLNM for those, and other, success stories.

Issue 3, 2017 – Volume 39, No. 3