Join Us In This Free Webcast!

You are cordially invited to "Pro Bono Opportunities with Immigrants and Refugees: Yes You Can!", on March 29 at noon Pacific Time. The location is your office, home, or anyplace you have Internet reception, because thanks to the help of the Washington State Bar, this is a free webcast!

Jordan S. Wasserman, pro bono coordinating attorney at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, will moderate a panel of several other attorneys describing how you can make an immediate contribution to the cause of peace by providing pro bono services to refugees and immigrants. Based on their personal experience, you can let a Qualified Legal Service Provider (QLSP) such as NWIRP prescreen a client, provide training and back-office support, and generally support you with your pro bono case.

This webcast is available to Section members and colleagues anywhere in our state (indeed, throughout the world!) Although you cannot directly earn CLE credit by participating, in the program you will learn how you can earn up to six credits a year, every year, by working a pro bono case with a QLSP. Everybody wins!

Feel free to invite colleagues to view this program with you; they don't have to be Section members although if they like what they see they may join the Section! 

I've never quite understood the maxim "Cast Your Bread Upon The Water." In my experience, if you throw bread on the water, the ducks get it, and it's not the best food for them at all.

Our Section's bread and butter is educational programming for peace through law. For practical reasons, our programs have always occurred in Seattle, which is a problem for the majority of Washington state lawyers who live outside Seattle. In addition, many of us who do live in the Emerald City still find it an additional chore to go downtown to meetings. Wouldn't it be nice if meetings came to us?

With the able assistance of WSBA staff, our section is starting a monthly series of educational webcasts. You can receive these wherever you have web access, whether home, office, library, airport, coffeeshop or at the shore feeding ducks. You can submit questions for the speaker through email for near-realtime responses. Because the cost of these webcasts is borne within the Section budget, you can share them with colleagues: the more the merrier!

To every up there is a down. First, we want these events to happen on a predictable day of the month. Allowing for prior users of the webcasting facility, the most consistent date on which the lunch hour was available was the final Friday of each month. Thus we have to move this series to "Final Friday." Mark your calendars!

Of greater significance is the inherent conflict between the financial, educational and accreditation needs of Section members. We can have free access to webcasting facilities once a month, but arranging for CLE credit is a more elaborate and expensive process. For example, it requires careful monitoring of who is signed on for the whole program, and reporting attendance to the MCLE Board; with webcasts, it's not simply a matter of collecting signatures on paper. 

We had the choice of charging for attendance, limiting attendance to in-person programs, or giving up on applying for CLE credit for every program. Because most Section members do not benefit from Seattle-only programming, we chose not to apply for CLE credit for this webcast series.

But wait! (you may be thinking) I need free CLE credits! 
Fear not; we will still be doing free CLE, starting with a great program on June 22 (see above). More significantly: the world of free or low-cost CLE is very different today than only a few years ago. In the past three years, there have been over 100 free CLE events in Washington State and you could access over 500 (not a misprint!) free CLE webcasts. This is in addition to dozens of credits available to you through WSBA's Public Service Program! If your concern is raw credit, that's a valid concern indeed and our Section should continue to promote free or low-cost CLE when we or others provide it. But to serve our members and the public, is it not better that we concentrate on our more unique contribution: promoting Peace Through Law?