President's Blog February 2025
Posted: 28 Feb 2025 by
I hope 2025 is treating you all well - nearly March!
The theme for this Blog is IAFL meetings. 2025 is the second year that you will have four meetings to choose from. There is no expectation that you will want or be able to attend all of the meetings we have on offer. You may remember that the decision to move to four meetings a year was taken back in 2017. The thinking was that having a broader geographic spread would provide greater opportunities for fellows to attend meetings closer to home, with education that was tailored to the regions we were in. Three of the four meetings a year would be hosted by Chapters, giving us the space to periodically have the AGM in parts of the world where we were looking to grow and raise our profile.
We are now one meeting down already. Earlier this month the USA and Canadian Chapters welcomed us to Charleston in South Carolina for a wonderful meeting. We were blessed with great weather and Wendy Crew and Oren Weinberg have set a high bar for the meetings that are still to come in 2025! Istanbul in May for the European Chapter; AGM in Nairobi in September and the Asia Pacific Chapter will take us to Hong Kong.
You have told us repeatedly that our meetings are one of the highlights of fellowship, and the statistics bear that out. In 2024 we had:
- Over 1,060 registrations across our 4 meetings
- 18 Fellows attended all four (most of them are on the Executive Committee) but 7 were not
- 37 Fellows attended 3 meetings
- 125 Fellows attended 2 meetings, and
- , we welcomed 125 lawyer guests.
Having lawyer guests attend meetings is hugely valuable for us. It allows people to get a feel for the IAFL, and get to know fellows. Do think about inviting family lawyers to attend if you think they would be eligible, or potentially eligible, for fellowship. Lawyers who would be eligible to apply can attend two meetings as a guest.
Those of you who were in Charleston heard me say that registration for the Nairobi meeting will go live next week. We are going to restrict registration for guests initially, to make sure that fellows get a chance to register, as there are a limited number of spaces for this meeting, and we were conscious that not everybody who wanted to come to the Paris meeting was able to. We’ll see how sign up goes and update you at the start of April. It goes without saying that if you are keen to come, don’t hang about!
We really appreciate you bearing with us in this brave new, post-covid, world as we navigate the challenges of meeting planning. It’s not been easy, with it being difficult to predict which meetings will be popular, having a need to be circumspect when it comes to committing the Academy to advance outlays, with huge changes across the hospitality industry, and increases in cost across the board, especially in relation to food and beverage costs.
When I took over as President, I said that I intended to focus on ensuring that all of you felt welcome and able to participate fully. It was a joy last year to plan the Boston AGM, which saw participation from 231 lawyers, from 28 different jurisdictions, with 9 first timers speaking and with a particular focus on having a more diverse and representative group from the fellowship participating. I hope that the meetings this year will allow some of those first timers to come to a second or third meeting (or I can think of one person for whom this would even be their fourth meeting, post Boston!), and, indeed that those of you who are longer in the tooth will find one or two, or more meetings in 2025, that you can come to and enjoy being with your IAFL family!
