Mid-Atlantic Women Legal Professionals’ Retreat Wrap Up
This past weekend, over 100 women legal professionals convened in Asheville, NC for the first Mid-Atlantic Women Legal Professionals’ Retreat. Women judges, magistrates, attorneys, law students, and other legal professionals joined from all five hosting states (Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia) and several other states where travel through the “friendly” skies was required.
Attendees were able to earn 10.5 – 14.1 CLE credits (depending on the approving state) and, most importantly, had an open opportunity for networking and fellowship with colleagues, participating in wellness awareness and skill-building exercises, developing and enhancing self-care, and processing life in our not-quite-post COVID world. The cost was able to be reasonably contained through with the assistance of our sponsors and exhibitors. In addition to having wellness practitioners, a publishing company, and treatment facilities, we are so pleased that Appalachian School of Law supported this event. We know wellness can never start too early and applaud their commitment to promoting healthy well-being in the law school.
When developing the concept and planning the event, we thought something like this might be needed in our area. We now know and were overwhelmingly reassured that that is the case. When asked why they attended, the most common response in the Retreat Evaluation Form was to “attend a women’s only retreat” followed by having an “interest in the topics” which included panels on women and gender, adapting practice to meet the lives of women, and, of course, the last session was for ethics credit. Just over 98% of the attendees indicated that they would join us for subsequent retreats. So, I guess we will just have to make that happen.
