President's Message

• Jurisdiction: Utah,United States
• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 3 Pg. 11
• Pages: 11
• Publication year: 2021

President's MessageNo. Vol. 34 No. 3 Pg. 11Utah Bar JournalJune, 2021

May, 2021

Reflections on 2020: Did We Rise to the Challenge?

by Heather Farnsworth

It was nearing midnight, and I was loading the last of a few items into my suitcase preparing to head to St. George. Then I got the message. We needed to have an emergency meeting - it was time to call off the 2020 Spring Convention - a first in the history of the Bar. It was a punch to the gut. I was over the planning and knew firsthand the countless hours of careful planning that the chair, Abby Dizon-Maughan, the committee, and bar staff members, Richard Dibble and Michelle Oldroyd, had put into the event. But, if the Utah Jazz was calling off games, it was serious. This was the moment the pandemic became "real" for me.

We all have those moments -some individual, some collective, some joyful, some devastating - where we remember exactly what we were doing in that moment, and after that moment, life became defined as before and after. However, unlike other monumental moments, I, like most of us, still had no real insight into the scope of what was to come. At first, we thought this may just be a few weeks, then a few months. Now, a year later, we have just wrapped up the 2021 Spring Convention. Of course this year's convention did not look like last year's convention would have. For starters, it was not in St. George. There was no annual bike ride or golf tournament. There was no browsing the "And Justice for All" auction during breaks, no welcome cocktail hour, no continental breakfast. Instead the event was 100% virtual. Still, we had record participation...