Inaugural Brunch for WIL in Denver

The Denver, Colorado, chapter of the JRCLS is pleased to announce the inaugural event for its Women in the Law group in the Denver area. The brunch will be held at the home of Carol Warnick on Saturday, April 28, from 12:30 - 2:00 pm in Greenwood Village. For more information, including location of the brunch, please email Verily Stephenson: sverily@yahoo.com.

Kudos to the Denver organizers of this event. This blog would be pleased to publish news of all WIL events, wherever held.

LDS Women in Science Credit JRCLS Blog

An unexpected email brightened our day recently. We reprint it here with the permission of the sender:

"Hello there,

"I've recently started up a professional organization for LDS women in
science, the Martha Hughes Cannon Society. I wanted you to know that
your Women in Law blog has been very helpful for me in seeing how an LDS professional women's organization can operate. Scientists are a little
challenged on the networking side of things sometimes, so it's good to
see how it's done by people who do advocacy for a living...."

Sarah Kendall Taber, D.P.M.
Postdoctoral Research Associate

Blueberry Breeding & Genetics Program
University of Florida

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for your kind words. We don't know how well the JRCLS WIL Blog represents 'people who do advocacy,' but like all bloggers, we suspect, we were inordinately pleased that you found us and spent a few moments with us. We are sympathetic and supportive of your efforts to give a voice to LDS women in science and are pleased to pass on the link you sent to the Martha Hughes Cannon Society: http://www.mhcsociety.blogspot.com/.

It's a beautiful blog.

We join you in seeking stories. What you said so eloquently makes even more connections possible. We are newly aware that our concerns are not isolated in our own profession but stretch across others, as well. We are grateful for our connections as LDS women. We have taken the liberty of quoting from your introduction to the MHCS blog:

"The women at the J. Reuben Clark Law society have done a fantastic job networking; they have an engaging blog that is brilliant, helpful, and perhaps most importantly, not so highly trafficked as to be overwhelming just to keep up with it. It stands to reason--lawyers do advocacy for a living, after all.

"Something the JRCLS does well is just tell stories. Stories about women who are longtime established professionals with years under their belts, stories about women on family hiatus, stories about young women just entering the profession and discovering for the first time the difficulties of balancing career and cultural expectations.

"Stories have a way of giving us a little mental hook to hang our own experiences on. For someone who's struggling to make or to live with complicated decisions, hearing someone else's experiences can be immensely helpful."

So--please send us your stories. With the stories come understanding, peace, courage. Thank you, Sarah. --JRCLS WIL Committee.

Intrepid WIL Panel at Stanford Tackles Conscience vs. Law

What to do when the law requires an attorney to act contrary to her conscience? Although historically more of a dilemma in developing countries, laws in the areas of religion, abortion, immigration, employment, education, and other fields increasingly intersect with deeply held beliefs.

The Women in the Law-sponsored panel at the JRCLS annual conference at Stanford Law School in February addressed these issues head-on. Professor Ryan Rowberry, Assistant Professor of Law at Georgia State University and recently a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow, described courageous lawyers and judges in three African countries who placed principle above legal and political pressure and bore the consequences of that choice. Cynthia Lange, partner in the San Francisco firm of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, posed the dilemma in the context of the LDS Church's recent statement on immigration, which encourages a lenient interpretation of the law. The room was full and the audience engaged. The question-and-answer session afterwards was particularly lively.

Both panelists were outstanding and gave freely and cheerfully from their hectic schedules. For me, at least, the discussion sparked a re-evaluation of assumptions and a new look at the place of the Savior in our profession.

Eileen Doyle Crane, Pre-law Advisor at Utah Valley University and member of the WIL Committee, was an articulate moderator and tone modulator. I especially appreciated her closing remarks on the fusion of faith and law.

--Elizabeth Shaw Smith, JRCLS WIL Chair

The Q&A session following

was sometimes intense.

Panelists Ryan Rowberry and Cynthia Lange

Women Throng to Stanford Conference, WIL Events

Law students Laura Taylor (Harvard), Rochelle Ellenburg (McGeorge), and Lindsay Rasmussen (Univ of Utah)

A record number of women attended the JRCLS annual conference at Stanford Law School, February 16-18, 2012. Of the 80 women registered in advance of the conference, almost half of those were law students. From the moving kick-off devotional in the exquisite Stanford Chapel to the section meetings on Saturday, participants seemed to bask in the rare opportunity to share experience, ideas, and values.

Approximately 35 women attended the WIL Breakfast Friday morning, despite the early 7:00 am hour. Special kudos to those who flew in from the East Coast the night before. Several mentioned having received a personal email invitation to the breakfast from Nan Barker, WIL Vice-Chair, alerting all of the time and place. Intangibles made the introductions perhaps the best part of the day--warmth, eagerness to learn about others' lives in the law, acceptance, relief to be able to share experiences: all were part of the breakfast ambiance. The great diversity in age, geography, time of coming to the law, current job/no job, and new babies all helped shape the congeniality in the room.

The four speakers at the breakfast also reflected a bouquet of experience and emotions: Mary Hoagland, assistant dean at BYU Law School, on professionalism and career options; Rochelle Ellenberg, third-year student at McGeorge Law School near Sacramento, on what the JRCLS has done for her and what she hopes it will do for her; Angel Zimmerman, WIL Committee member from Topeka Kansas, mother of four, seminary teacher, president of the Kansas Women Lawyers Association, on work-life balance and involvement in the non-LDS legal community; and Heather Takahashi, Los Angeles WIL leader and future LA-chapter chair, on the LA WIL activities and organization.

Jeanne Young (Sacramento, CA) and

Sheri Sudweeks (Los Gatos, CA)

Let's Dialogue: Law Firm Stress v. Everything Else

We were impressed with the candor in Megan (Woodhouse) Needham's comment, below. Readers, please share your thoughts.

I am a second year associate at Kirkland & Ellis in New York, and there have been a few things I have really struggled with over the past year and a half. On one hand, I feel like I went into law school thinking that I was pursuing a career that would afford me significant opportunities and flexibility. On the other hand, the only job I could really get coming out of school was at a firm that expects everything out of its associates. In looking at what my "other options" are, I feel that I am not qualified to do much else than work at a law firm, and I feel like it is difficult to navigate important life events (like marriage and starting a family) when your "examples" within any geographical proximity seem to be women who have made the decision that career is an important part of their lives.

The reality is that each of us only has 24 hours each day, and if we choose to work, that is going to take most of our time. Women who try to do the part time thing can often find themselves working similarly crazy hours for reduced pay. I've tried to find some meaning in my disenchanted realization that perhaps the law is not quite so flexible as some people made it out to be, and at the same time, perhaps big law firm life doesn't have to mean complete surrender to the will of one's bosses.

Megan (Woodhouse) Needham is a 2010 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and is an intellectual property associate at Kirkland & Ellis, NYC.

"Tell Your Stories!" Says Claudia Bushman at Phoenix WIL Lunch

On November 4, the Phoenix JRCLS Women in the Law group held its Fall Luncheon. In addition to enjoying good food and each others' great company, the group had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Claudia L. Bushman speak on the topic "Telling Our Stories."

Claudia Bushman is a scholar of American and Mormon history and a pioneer in studying and capturing Mormon women's voices. She is the author of a number of books, including her most recent, Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America. She has spent the past few years teaching at Claremont Graduate University with her husband, historian Richard L. Bushman, and they will be teaching a course together on Contemporary Mormonism at Columbia University in the spring.

She was a recipient of the prestigious Leonard J. Arrington Award from the Mormon History Association in 2010, and her latest project is an oral history project called, "Mormon Women in the Twentieth Century." Her daughter, Phoenix lawyer Margaret LaBianca, gave the introductory remarks, and Dr. Bushman's granddaughter (also named Claudia) was also in attendance.

Dr. Bushman talked about the Mormon Women Oral History Project, which records and transcribes the words of contemporary Mormon women for scholarly use. The collection currently has over 100 completed histories with many others in the works. Dr. Bushman shared several heart-felt personal narrative excerpts from the project and encouraged all in attendance to believe that they have stories worth recording, and to take concrete and immediate steps to start (or continue) recording their own personal stories as well as the stories of loved ones.

As Dr. Bushman emphasized, when a person leaves this earth, he or she takes a personal library of information that should not go unrecorded while the opportunity exists. Sharing doable tips and suggestions for capturing our stories on an ongoing and consistent basis, those in attendance left enriched and inspired. As the author Ursula Le Guin put it: "There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Here's to telling our stories!

--Jessica Everett-Garcia is a partner in the Phoenix office of Perkins Coie and practices in the area of complex commercial litigation. Jessica is the current chair of the WIL Committee for the JRCLS Phoenix Chapter.

Twitter and JRCLS--Together at Last!

Newly installed international JRCLS chair, Doug Bush, has brought the JRCLS into the Twitter Age. To receive updates on what'a happening in JRCLS chapters around the world, including new events hosted by a chapter, members' achievements, national and international news items affecting JRCLS goals and work, go to www.jrcls.org and click "Follow" on the bottom left-hand side.

Or just click on this "follow" link: https://twitter.com/jrclschair