NAPD 2024 Women's Virtual Conference

This session will focus on Black women's role, necessity, and burden in death penalty mitigation work. We will discuss the empathy, care, understanding in mitigation, presumption, trauma, and burden we should perpetually consider and nurture.

Managing up ... what does it mean? Is this a corporate management buzzword or something you could actually use? Come learn the ins and outs of a framework to help develop a stronger interpersonal relationship between you, your boss, and your coworkers - including learning how to manage expectations on all sides.

What if all it took to prevent a capital murder was ONE person caring about the would-be offender?  This session aims to inform and inspire by presenting research from the field of capital litigation, showing that the difference between capital murderers and similarly situated individuals who did not kill is often just one person. A teacher. A coach. A family friend. A criminal defense attorney. Yes, YOU. You could be that person. Capital case mitigation files show time and again that capital defendants didn’t have a chance from the start—they come from broken homes marked by physical and sexual abuse that all too often qualify as “terrorization.” But when researchers look at siblings subject to the exact same conditions—siblings who showed sure signs of trauma but did not commit capital murder—the difference was often just one person who cared. What does it tell us that capital defendants often can’t point to a single person in their life who believed in them and treated them with kindness? And what are the lessons for criminal defense attorneys who come into contact with offenders at various points in their lives?  Answering these questions—and highlighting the critically important role that criminal defense attorneys play in serving the most vulnerable members of society—is the aim of this session.

The workshop will provide practical tools and insights to help women in public defense and their teams elevate their professional presence and impact. In this interactive session, participants will learn how to define and communicate their unique value, leverage their personal brand to advance their careers, and build influence within their organizations and the broader legal community.

This is a panel of lived experts calling out and calling in challenges and confrontations as a person of color navigating a white system to now professionals working with other Parents navigating those same systems, how white privilege shows up, and how to navigate those issues as now a lived expert professional.

Women-identifying attorneys face both internal and external challenges when negotiating with men. Presenters will walk participants through real-world examples, offer battlefield advice, and offer solutions for the internal work and external structures that must change to do our best work. Participants will gain tools to recognize, confront, and process misogyny-charged interactions quickly and effectively to get back to work in negotiations.  Participants will use those tools to prepare themselves for those internal challenges that include knowing gender-based discrimination will happen, knowing that it does happen (to everyone), and preparing for what happens next when these exchanges occur. Tools offered emphasize solidarity, collaboration, and, at times, demands for systemic change. Participants leave more armored with their individual power to win and more appreciative of their gifts, cloaked with and unique to their own womanhood.