The King County Bar Association’s Leadership Development & Nominations Committee is pleased to announce the following slate of KCBA members for open positions on the Board of Trustees, effective July 1, 2024. Additional candidates may run for any of these offices through the petition process prescribed in the bylaws. If no petitions are received by April 10, the slate will be deemed elected. For more information, contact KCBA Executive Director Christina Coad by email (christinac@kcba.org) or phone (206.267.7061). Further details are online at www.kcba.org/board. The King County Bar Association expresses its gratitude to the 2023–2024 Leadership Development & Nominations Committee for its work in recruiting this slate of candidates: Cynthia Jones, Chair (Jones Legal Group, LLC), Jennifer Payseno (McKinley Irvin), Stew Cogan (Stew Cogan Arbitrator – Mediator), Paris Kallas (Judicial Dispute Resolution), Eric Lansverk (Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson P. S.), Robert Flennaugh II (The Law Office of Robert Flennaugh II, PLLC), and Shashi Vijay (VJ Law Firm). 

The King County Bar Association exists as a vehicle to bring our professional community together. Our mission is to foster, advance and serve a membership that is both diverse and collaborative. To achieve this part of our mission the KCBA must be a place where people who hold divergent opinions still work together for the betterment of the profession, our community, ourselves, and our society. The inclusion of the front-page opinion piece in last month’s Bar Bulletin had serious consequences and caused harm to many members of our community.

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, by professor of cognitive philosophy Andy Clark, was recognized as one of the best social science books released in 2023. In it, Clark highlights the changing views of how our brain experiences and interpret the world around us, drawing on extensive neuroscientific research to show us how our experiences of reality are quite different than what we tend to think.

As a new voice addressing the broader KCBA community, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alyssa Nevala, and I am the Chair of the KCBA New Lawyers Division. I’m grateful for this opportunity to highlight the KCBA New Lawyers Division (NLD), and importantly, the NLD’s Spring Soirée happening next month on April 4, 2024.

This month, on March 21st and 22nd, the Washington State Bar Association hosts the 26th Annual Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference.

The practice of law is about building relationships in an environment where various positions and perspectives are paramount. I can think of no other profession built upon a divergent discourse, where we are applying the same set of facts to sometimes polarizing ends of a spectrum.While predictable and familiar, the human creation of dichotomy where all is categorized into either a political left or right and the splitting of perception into black or white, is hurting lawyers, harming judges and the judiciary, and threatening the rule of law and our democracy. I write this opinion today as a call for the legal community to consider the spectrum in its complexity and entirety, instead of splitting it into a binary of black and white, or political left or right.

The KCBA Labor & Employment Law Section is proud to present the 57th Annual Pacific Coast Labor & Employment Law Conference at the Seattle Convention Center on April 18 & 19, 2024. 

In Memoriam
Steve Ellis, 1945–2024

King County Bar was saddened to hear of the passing of Steve Ellis on February 12. Steve was a long-time friend of the Bar and served the KCBF President from 2009 to 2010.

To celebrate Steve’s life and his great commitment to the legal profession, we are re-running a 2011 Bar Bulletin profile of Steve which details his deep devotion to service, to mentorship, and to social justice. Like many others, King County Bar is proud to call Steve a friend. He will be missed.

What felt like just yesterday, the King County Law Library announced the “arrival” of our new baby, the King County Law Library Foundation, in these very pages.

KCBA received dozens of comments from members, nonmembers and community partners regarding the publication and subsequent decision to remove Ms. Abudiab’s article. We received many expressing hurt, sadness, and anger for publishing the article, and others from people hurt and angry that we had taken the article down from the KCBA website. While we do not have space to print all the comments and letters received, we believe it is important to provide a sample.