kbf president
Ethics for Good — This summer, join in honoring the creators; participate for your own benefit! by Amy Fellows Cline
“Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.” – Paolo Giordana, The Solitude of Prime Numbers: A Novel
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or several years now, the co-creators of the Ethics for Good CLE Program have used this quote to kick off their annual ethics CLE sessions. While I agree with their assessment of this statement as the “best ethics quote” they’ve seen, it is also a fitting description of the resounding “butterfly effect” success of the choices these men made, as a result of a lunch conversation more than twenty years ago. During that fateful lunch, attorneys Mark Hinderks and Stan Davis, and then-Johnson County District Court Judge Steve Leben, were lamenting the “plethora of painfully poor and palpably putrid professional programs.”1 While we’ve all no doubt shared in those sentiments, these men decided to do something about it. The plan they hatched that day has not only vastly improved the options available to satisfy Kansas and Missouri attorneys’ annual two-hour ethics educational
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The Journal of the Kansas Bar Association
requirement, but it has raised more than $700,000 in donations to local charities. The Ethics for Good CLE program has been one of the Kansas Bar Foundation’s most lasting and fruitful partnerships. Each June, two live, two-hour CLE sessions are offered in the Kansas City area. Touted as “Ethics CLE meets humor, for good,” these seminars are attended annually by about 600 attorneys. In addition to Hinderks, Davis and Leben, the current presenters of the Ethics for Good educational program include Kansas City area attorneys Todd LaSala, Jim Griffin, Jacy Hurst, and Todd Ruskamp, as well as Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Melissa Standridge. The Kansas Bar Foundation sponsors the program and assists with marketing, reservations, invoicing and preparing materials.
