President’s Message: Aaron Mohamed, January 2023

By Aaron Mohamed

Dear Fellow Bar Members:

Welcome to the practice of law in Santa Cruz County, in 2023.

I am happy to be serving as this year’s President of the Bar Association.  This brief message is meant to provide an update as to what the Bar Association will be doing in the coming year.

First, if you haven’t yet renewed your membership please do so at your earliest.  Simply click below to be directed to our website renewal portal. Our organization depends on its member subscriptions to keep things running, so please renew without delay.

I am excited to announce that we are going to be adding a video update component to our monthly Bar Buzz emails!  This will be a way for the Bar Association to offer a more interactive and modern sensibility to our activities.  It will also allow us to offer video promotions for our top two sponsors.

In terms of sponsorships, we encourage our returning sponsors to renew their commitment for 2023.  If you are a new potential sponsor, please contact our executive director Lori King to learn about the sponsorship benefits we offer.

Our monthly MCLE and quarterly Bench Bar programs will be continuing apace.  We will be returning to holding in person MCLEs this year (in addition to our virtual program).  our first in-person on MCLE will be February 28th at noon at the El Palomar restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz.  Local attorney Dana Scruggs will be presenting on the topic of how to calculate damages in personal injury cases.  Our next Bench Bar will be February 1, 2023 via Zoom – you should have already seen this notification email, and we hope to see you at that meeting.

Our social calendar will feature four in person events, commencing with our Spring Fling, which will be held on Thursday, March 23rd at Hotel Paradox.  Look for a further notification email, but in the meantime please mark your calendars and plan on joining us.

We are in need of more panelists for the Lawyer Referral Service and will be working on updating and modernizing the LRS program in the coming year.  We encourage all members of the Bar Association to consider joining LRS for 2023.  We ask that you consider joining as part of the furtherance of the Bar Association’s mission, which includes promoting meaningful access to justice to all members of the community.

Finally, it should be agreed among local practitioners that Santa Cruz enjoys a legal community marked with civility and comradery.  The Bar Association is dedicated to preserving that temperament among our local counsel, and we ask for your support and feedback as we join in the cause of that effort.

William Jennings Bryan once said:  “I know of no more noble profession than the law… its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.”

May we all do our parts to ensure that the practice of law in our community remains a noble profession.

Happy New Year,

Aaron J. Mohamed