By Rick Conner
The Litigation Section has three upcoming events that you will not want to miss!
First, on May 18, at noon EDT, the Litigation Section will hold its annual meeting via Zoom. All members are welcome to attend. We will discuss the section’s activities, introduce our new officers and council members, and present The Advocate’s Award, our section’s highest honor, to another esteemed member of our section. Register now to attend!
Frequently, legal professionals find themselves in a dual role – leaders and managers. While there are many similarities between those two roles, the primary distinction is that a leader focuses more on people while a manager focuses more on the technical aspects of completing a project. Legal professionals need both skill sets to be effective in their organizations.
If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this. Leaders are thermostats. They set the temperature of their organization. Staff, volunteers, and team members are thermometers. They read the temperature of their organization. This “setting” and “reading” of temperatures is your organizational culture. It affects how your members work together. Organizational culture can be an engine propelling a mission forward or a blockade stifling every opportunity for improvement. To create a healthy work environment, legal professionals must create and maintain a functional organizational culture that is informed, effective, respectful, candid, compassionate, and just.
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MIP’s Diverse Perspectives is a monthly blog feature to spotlight a member from North Carolina’s community of diverse attorneys and legal professionals. Members have the opportunity to share a personal perspective through a brief set of interview questions.
This month’s perspective is courtesy of Rashad L. Morgan, Shareholder & Intellectual Property Attorney, Brinks Gilson & Lione, Durham, NC.
What law school did you attend and what was your graduation year?
University of Cincinnati College of Law, 2006.
This piece was selected as a winning entry in the YLD’s 2021 Writing Competition.
COVID-19 pandemic hits the United States. Breonna Taylor. U.S. unemployment jumps to the highest rate since the Great Depression. George Floyd. Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustices worldwide. West Coast wildfires. Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies. Chadwick Boseman dies at 43 due to colon cancer. Trump loses the presidential bid for a second term. Joe Biden is elected president of the United States. Kamala Harris is elected first Black, Indian vice president of the United States. Widespread, unproven allegations of voter fraud begin to question the validity of the election. Over 500,000 Americans die from COVID-19. Tent cities filled with homeless people surround our cities. The U.S. gives struggling Americans $600 in the midst of an economic crisis. Death penalty reinstated for federal crimes for the first time since 2003. One in five prisoners in the U.S. contract COVID-19. Insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol. Trump becomes the first U.S. President to be impeached twice. The list goes on . . .
It’s hard to believe that all of the above-listed events happened within a one-year span. It is as if one day we were all living our regular lives and then tragedy struck. Life as we knew it changed. We could no longer do mundane activities that we once took for granted. All of our past achievements and future aspirations became less important as we were grateful just to be alive. Read more
Jonathan Ellis
Erik Zimmerman
By Jonathan Ellis and Erik Zimmerman
The Appellate Practice Section is pleased to present its 2021 CLE, Effective Appellate Litigation: Improving Your Practice in State and Federal Courts of Appeals.
During this program, superstars of the North Carolina bench and bar will cover a variety of topics to help you become a better and more effective appellate attorney.
Our speakers include:
By Rachel Royal 
As of April 2019, there were over 1,225,000 active license suspensions in the state of North Carolina related to unpaid traffic fines and failure to appear in court.[1] Even more disheartening is that poverty and systemic racism, rather than a willful refusal to appear in court or to pay fines, are the driving factors of a majority of these suspensions.
The statewide suspension rate of Black or African American drivers is four times higher than that of white, non-Hispanic drivers. This racial disparity is higher in some counties, both urban and rural. For example, in Wake County, the suspension rate for Black or African American drivers is seven times higher than that of white, non-Hispanic drivers. In Rowan and Cabarrus counties, it’s more than five times higher. In Watauga County, it’s almost seven times higher. These findings are based on all available data.[2]
By