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President's Message:Thank YouMeade W. MitchellPresidentThe Mississippi Bar2024-2025It is hard to believe the year has passed so quickly, and that this edition of The Mississippi Lawyer is my last column. Thank you for your trust and support. It has been an incredible privilege to serve as President of The Mississippi Bar.As this Bar year closes, I am pleased to report the Bar has been extremely busy. The Bar conducted both the Fall and Spring Bar Admissions programs, multiple Town Hall meetings throughout the State, a Memorial Service for friends and colleagues that left us, and the massive Statewide High School Mock Trial Competition. Also, for the first time in many years, Mississippi hosted the Southern Conference of Bar Presidents Annual Meeting in Jackson, treating state bar association executives, presidents, and past presidents from Oklahoma to Maryland to the hospitality our state is so well known for. For the 25th year, the Bar conducted the Dukes Professionalism program for the incoming classes at our law schools. Lawyers from throughout Mississippi volunteer for this program. It is no coincidence that the Bar introduces the subject of professionalism to law students as they begin law school. It is by design that the first message they hear concerns professionalism. It is the same message they are reminded of throughout law school, and the same they recite when raising their right hand to be sworn in to practice law. Legal professionalism embraces lofty standards of quality, competence, and diligence. But it is also more. The Mississippi Bar works to impress upon law students and practicing lawyers that they should not merely adhere to important standards of technical and intellectual ability, but they should also conduct themselves with the highest standards of character and honor.The Bar also continued its project of providing funding for law students to work in underserved areas. The legal and medical profession in Mississippi have one thing in common; there are areas which simply do not have enough doctors and lawyers. Twentythree counties in Mississippi have fewer than 10 lawyers, and 10 counties have five or less. Everyone needs access to lawyers. The public needs lawyers for adoption, child custody, and divorce and attorneys are indispensable to those accused of crimes or involved in accidents. The Mississippi Bar remained steady in its support of the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, which provides Mississippians of limited means high quality pro bono legal assistance. Over the last 40 years, MVLP has provided free legal assistance to over 40,000 Mississippians. The Bar also champions pro bono work and asks every lawyer to provide 12 hours of pro bono service a year. All Mississippi lawyers report to the Bar their pro bono hours and, last year, our members provided 126,914 hours of pro bono legal service. Several other noteworthy initiatives are: 1) the Bar hosted the Leadership Mississippi Bar Program, for the 10th year, which offers young attorneys the chance to prepare for leadership roles in the Bar, their communities, and our State; 2) our Find a Lawyer Directory is a success. It is a search tool not just for lawyers, but for residents of our State to find lawyers. Over 130,000 people accessed the directory in the year since its creation; 3) the Bar worked to tackle the use of Artificial Intelligence in the legal profession. It issued a thorough ethics opinion on the topic and a practical how-to-use publication is in the works; and 4) committees reviewed older resource books of the Bar for practitioners, and several are in the process of being updated. Many projects of the Bar are multi-year endeavors. For example, after years of study and effort, this year the Mississippi Supreme Court approved the use of Collaborative Law. Collaborative Law is a voluntary dispute resolution process where parties in a legal conflict, like divorce, agree to work together respectfully and in good faith to reach a mutually agreeable settlement outside of court.%u00a0The push to enact it begin as a project of President Jennifer Johnson in 2020, and she continued to champion it long thereafter. Another project underway is the mission to secure group insurance for lawyers through The Mississippi Bar. It began at the urging of President Jenny Tyler Baker in 2023, continued in earnest this year, and hopefully will be a reality in 2026. One effort I particularly focused on was assisting local bar associations. This year, the Bar met with the presidents of all the State local bars to allow each to share their success stories and ideas and is packaging those ideas and others into a pamphlet to give each local bar a roadmap for greater success. The Bar also conducted in-person social events in central, south, and north Mississippi to bring all the local bars together and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak to nearly a dozen local bar associations. Being able to meet with and speak to so many of the local bar members at the meetings and socials was a real pleasure and a highlight for me this year. Local bar associations are a wonderful ground for attorneys to forge professional relationships and connections. They provide a great chance for networking, since most offer regular luncheons, mixers, and forums for attorneys to interact. They are wonderful places for mentorship, and they offer opportunities to obtain continuing legal education and to serve the community on projects. Strong local bar associations provide opportunities for lawyers of any practice to meet and get to know one another, and the cama6 SPRING 2025