For nearly 90 years, the State Bar of California hosted an annual convention that brought together hundreds of lawyers for educational programming, keynote speeches and networking.
But amid legislative scrutiny and concerns about optics, the bar’s board voted to cancel the 2017 meeting that was to be held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.
The bar association later decided to stop hosting such gatherings indefinitely, determining they were emblematic of the trade association-like activities it wanted to put in its past.
However, the so-called annual meeting for attorneys and various legal organizations was revived last year by a new group: the California Lawyers Association, known as CLA.
The nonprofit launched in 2018 to house the State Bar’s specialty law sections that were split off as part of the agency’s legislatively mandated de-unification. Read more……
