President's Blog, April 2026
Posted: 1 Apr 2026 by Heather Hostetter
Dublin is sold out! April’s Fools! Seriously, I’m just kidding. While we have had robust registration since registration opened on March 17th - 192 registrations in the first 24 hours, we still have plenty of room for more attendees. However, the Intercontinental Hotel, the main conference hotel, does not have any more rooms on August 28th and 29th, but there are still rooms on the nights of the conference (September 2-5) and there are also still rooms at two nearby other hotels, the Clayton, and the Herbert Park. Please note the conference will be open for registration of lawyer guests starting April 9th and we will keep a waiting list for guests once the maximum number of guest slots has been reached. The more Fellows who attend, the more guests can come so spots do open up as Fellows register. Please note that if your preferred social activity is full, don’t despair because once all the activities are booked up, many of them can be expanded to include more people. Just let us know at iafl@judylaneics.com what you’d still like to do if we can enlarge the number of participants. Please also be kind and polite with our heroes at Judy Lane while registering – they will help you sort it all out but it’s so much easier for them to help if we’re not taking our frustration out on them. It’s going to be a great annual general meeting! The energy and excitement around it are already infectious.
The IAFL has had an active seven weeks since we all met in Barcelona.
Immediately following the Barcelona meeting, Rachael Kelsey and Alice Meier-Bourdeau attended the 54th European Presidents’ Conference of Bars and Law Societies (EPK) in Vienna, Austria, on behalf of the IAFL. Not only is it important that the IAFL is invited to this gathering annually as a partner with other law societies with common organizational aims, but it was productive in that Rachael and Alice met several experienced family lawyers based in Austria and other Eastern European jurisdictions, where we are very much under-represented, and hopefully this outreach leads to more applications for fellowship.
In the beginning of March, Suzanne Todd and I attended Fellow, Zenobia Du Toit’s annual Global Family Law Conference in Capetown, S. Africa, on behalf of the IAFL. Suzanne was a superstar with three speaking slots, and I was delighted to only have one speaking slot which meant I got to experience the joy of being an attendee, not an organizer, at a conference that was a well-oiled machine. The IAFL hosted the opening night happy hour where our Fellow from South Africa, Pat Moodley, also debuted her new book, Sunshine Lost. Kudos to Pat. Many other IAFL fellows, including our Fellows who are also in the leadership of AIJUDEFA, were speakers at the conference too, and it made me proud to see what a contribution our organization makes at other conferences we are invited to present at.
We also took the opportunity while in Capetown to meet with our Fellows based on the continent
of Africa to go over what is required to apply to be a provisional chapter – a similar exercise to what occurred in 2017, which led to the formation of our dynamic Asia Pacific Chapter. It is exciting to see the other regions of the world without their own chapters in our organization gather themselves to organize to apply to have a seat at the decision-making table. We have more than doubled our number of African fellows since 2023 and since that time, we also have added 6 new African countries to our fellowship. As a result of our increased African fellowship in IAFL, we have been provided opportunities to partner with other organizations, such as the East African Law Society (“EALS”), which has 45,000 members, and that led to our first joint webinar with EALS on March 10th on adoption. Between the meetings in Nairobi and Capetown, I am inspired and impressed by the amount of innovation in family law I see in Africa, and it has been a privilege to learn about it directly from African family lawyers and judges.
Unfortunately, due to the conflict in the Middle East, we had to postpone our regional Middle Eastern meeting which was to have been held in Kuwait at the end of March. We will reschedule the meeting when the region is not so understandably consumed with more pressing matters. Our love and support go out to our Fellows in the Middle East who are being directly impacted by this crisis.
Can’t come to a meeting or want to interact with your IAFL colleague in between meetings? Be on the lookout for a webinar from each chapter and committee in the coming months (see the schedule thus far here) in celebration of the IAFL’s 40th anniversary!
Speaking of educational opportunities, Suzanne Todd met last week with the educational co-chairs for the 2027 conferences. We welcome any suggestions by Fellows about topics you would like to see covered next year as well as formats for the CLEs that you enjoy or would like to see deployed. Please email Suzanne any of these suggestions for consideration by the education co-chairs. We appreciate your feedback.
I look forward to seeing approximately 170 of you in KL next month!
Warmly, Heather
