The past five months have been challenging. On March 10, 2020, the governor of Virginia closed schools. On March 18, 2020, I began working from our three-bedroom condo. My husband and I had to create a new routine for our four-year-old autistic son, who thrives on consistency and needs school for socialization. Living in the heart of Arlington, Virginia, a few Metro stops from Washington, D.C., we never thought twice about urban living. I would walk a block to the Metro and be downtown at my office in 20 minutes. I never needed a home office, as our son would be sleeping when I would work at night. We have a handful of playgrounds within a mile walk. But, our Metro station closed, the playgrounds were locked, and I continued my medical malpractice defense work from a beanbag chair in our bedroom.

My calendar was no longer filled with the DRI Medical Liability and Health Care Law and the DRI Employment and Labor Law Committees' seminars, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting, and the spring board meeting. Taking their places were countless Zoom "Happy Hours." I was able to catch a few noon coffee breaks with President-Elect Emily Coughlin. I attended the timely webinars relevant to my practice, including Litigation Against Nursing Homes/ALFs Following the COVID-19 Pandemic: Three Things to Do Now to Prepare, discussing relevant legal aspects of COVID-19, and COVID-19 and Its Effects on Communities of Color, addressing health care disparities in the United States in communities of color. Many of my weekly DRI calls became Zoom meetings, and I was able to stay in touch with colleagues and friends who I would talk with regularly, but now see on a weekly basis. These webinars and Zoom calls made me feel connected, when I often felt isolated in my daily practice of law on my beanbag chair.

My work also continued as the co-vice-chair of the DRI Membership Committee. Anne Talcott, chair of the DRI Membership Committee, Gary Grubler, my co-vice chair, and the DRI staff felt that it was important to shift our bi-weekly membership leadership calls to weekly meetings.

While our committee is charged with recruiting new members to DRI, we temporarily put aside our recruiting efforts to do what DRI does best: we focused on our members. Our Membership Committee meetings, state membership chair meetings, and substantive law committee membership meetings became Zoom meetings. We shared stories of hand sanitizer hoarding; we compared how different jurisdictions were handling depositions, hearings, and trials in the time of COVID-19; and we discussed how everyone was handling the struggles with health, work, and families. If my membership in DRI has taught me anything, it is that my family's experiences, while different, were no less challenging than anyone else's.

My experiences through the pandemic also reinforced the importance of my membership in DRI and in my state and local defense organizations (SLDOs). One of the biggest challenges during the pandemic was and continues to be keeping up with the ever-changing status of court openings, tolling of statutes of limitations and other deadlines, and filing procedures. Luckily, there was Maryland Defense Counsel, Inc., D.C. Defense Lawyers' Association, and Virginia Association of Defense Attorneys. These SLDOs have been on top of the local legal climate.

Additionally, in the past few months, as many of us have moved to various phases of reopening, DRI has also shifted its seminars to the virtual format. One of the projects that kept me busy since the start of the pandemic has been tracking state immunity executive orders and statutes protecting health care providers from medical malpractice claims. Engagement in DRI has provided me with the opportunity to speak on this topic at the virtual Medical Liability and Health Care Law Seminar, on August 20-21, 2020, with fellow board member, James Craven. I encourage those of you who typically attend this DRI Medical Liability and Health Care Law Committee seminar to register so that we can catch up virtually.

For all the good days, and the not so good days, I'm grateful for our health and the health of our close family members and friends. I'm grateful for our son's amazing therapists. I'm grateful to my firm's leadership and my team of associates. I'm grateful to my husband for all he does. I'm grateful for the extra-long PB&J lunch breaks and too many viewings of the Disney Cars movie franchise with our son. I'm thrilled that the playgrounds are now open. I hope that everyone will wear a mask so that it is safe for my son to go back to school.

While I now go to the office two days a week to try to regain a bit of "normalcy," I am one of the few. Downtown is empty and my colleagues are still working from home. Washington, D.C.'s "Black Lives Matter Plaza" is one block away, and I've watched as the boarded up windows have come down. I've conducted virtual mediations and virtual hearings, but it still feels far from normal. In those moments, I'm grateful for my connections to DRI and its members. I'm looking forward to seeing many of my DRI friends at the upcoming virtual DRI Medical Liability and Health Care Law Seminar and the virtual Annual Meeting in October. I hope you will join me.

Originally published by DRI: The Voice on the 12th of August, 2020

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