The Marion County Judicial Selection Committee is beginning the process of selecting names to send to Governor Holcomb to fill a Republican vacancy on the Marion Superior Court. The vacancy will occur when Judge Lisa Borges retires on December 31, 2020.

We are eight months into wading through COVID-19. I have heard several people talk about feeling more depressed, anxious and tired. Make a conscious effort to rest and recharge. Here are some simple ways to cope.

We laugh about pandemic parenting, online learning, and socially distant play for children. Underneath the humor is the larger fact base—this pandemic is broadly affecting children’s lives. It’s crept into their education, their extracurricular activities, their home lives, their ability to connect with friends, their access to libraries, their access to needed services, and generally, their visibility into the world. They are isolated in little pandemic quarantine bubbles with their families, and maybe a quarantine family buddy.

Attorneys are very good at creating specific documents for clients from existing templates. But, when they run through that process, they’re often using antiquated tools, like ‘find and replace’, or making edits by hand. That’s one of the reasons that legal services are so expensive, is that lawyers’ old school methods make it that way. 

In our profession, we are taught to be respectful and civil toward the court, toward our clients and toward our fellow practitioners. During a time where everyone is suffering through the added stress of a pandemic, you may have caught yourself being impatient, combative, dare I say, snarky, when you otherwise may not have been.  

As you begin to return to the office and reopen your practice, you may be feeling a little anxious about the unknown. The landscape has changed and we need to make sure we are all doing our part to keep ourselves, our families, our co-workers and our clients safe. There are a few things you can do to prepare to re-open your practice.

As lawyers, many of our relationships are governed by our rules of professional conduct. For the most part, these rules place burdens, limits and duties on us. The judge-lawyer relationship, however, is governed by interlocking rules from both sides. In our practices, lawyers are limited in what we can say to a judge, as well as when and how we say it. We may really want to let the judge know what we think is going on in a case, or we may really want to know what the judge is thinking on an issue, but often can’t just say or ask what we want.

The proposed amendments affect LR49-TR79-223 Initial Request for Change of Judge, LR-TR-79-224 Appointment by Clerk, LR49-TR79-225 Acceptance, and LR49-TR3-200 Random Filing of Civil Cases. 

The world has changed and the world of public education has been forced to change along with it. From using hybrid models of both in-school and virtual instruction, alternative day schedules, to school districts that have foregone offering any in-person instruction at all, the changes to public education are varied. While these changes affect most of us with children of school age, they deeply and significantly affect parents of children who have special needs in terms of education or health.

The nomination period has begun for the 2021 Board of Directors of the Indianapolis Bar Association, and Kelley Johnson of the Law Office of Kelley J. Johnson LLP  has been appointed to chair the effort. Johnson, who is a past president of the Indianapolis Bar Foundation, will lead a committee of members in selecting a slate of officers for the coming year.