Virginia Lawyers Weekly

The Virginia Bar Association and the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association are joining forces to restructure the VBA Coalition Committee on Family Law Legislation.

The VBA formed the coalition in 1996 to bring bar groups together to evaluate family law legislation before the Virginia General Assembly and to support or oppose bills reflecting a consensus of coalition members.

The new organization will be called the Virginia Family Law Coalition and will be administered jointly by the VBA and the VTLA. Both organizations will provide lobbying and staff support for the coalition.

Jack Harris, executive director of the VTLA, and Guy Tower, his counterpart with the VBA, said the new organization grew out of the successful collaboration of the two organizations earlier this year in winning repeal of Virginia Code § 20-124.3:1, which generally prohibited the admissibility of evidence related to a parent’s mental health in custody disputes.

The effort “was effective because we worked together to make it happen,” Harris said. “We didn’t work together the previous year, and it didn’t happen.”

Membership in the coalition will be by invitation. It will include representatives from the family law sections of the VTLA and VBA and from other state legal organizations with a family law component, such as the Virginia chapter of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Cheshire I’Anson Eveleigh, a family lawyer from Virginia Beach, will be the first chairman of the restructured organization. She has served as chair of the family law sections of the VBA and the Virginia State Bar. She also is a former member of the VBA board of governors and a former president of the Norfolk & Portsmouth Bar Association.

Harris and Tower praised the work of Arlington lawyer Betty Thompson, who served as chairman of the VBA Coalition for 12 years. Harris said Thompson, a former VTLA president and a recipient of the group’s Distinguished Service a-ward, “has provided a lifetime of extraordinary service to Virginia bar associations and therefore to the lawyers and people of Virginia. We are pleased to assume a more prominent role in this great coalition she worked so hard to build.”

The collaboration of the VBA and the VTLA on the family law issue last year followed by a year their collective effort to finally win a limited waiver of the fee caps for attorneys who represent indigent criminal defendants.

“There are any number of things we’ll be working on together as we go forward,” Harris said. “It’s a tough world out there for voluntary associations. If you can work together with other associations, you should do it.”

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