RICHMOND, Va. –
More than 135 legal professionals from across the Defense Logistics Agency enterprise participated in the DLA Office of General Counsel’s Legal Education and Training Seminar (LETS) Apr. 25-27. The event was held in downtown Richmond, Virginia.
Defense Logistics Agency Vice Director Brad Bunn served as the keynote speaker for the event, themed “Delivering Legal Excellence in a Decisive Decade.”
The legal team at DLA Aviation on Defense Supply Center Richmond hosted the event. Aviation Acting Chief Counsel Lenny Rogers said LETS has existed under a variety of names for more than 30 years. He said this was the first since 2018.
The three-day seminar featured plenary sessions on topics such as industry compliance programs, legislative affairs, and professional responsibility in a decisive decade. Breakout sessions focused on various topics, such as understanding intellectual property and data rights, organizational conflicts of interest, government ethics, effective utilization of paralegals and when reasonable accommodations requests seem unreasonable.
Rogers said most state bars require attorneys to get continuing legal education credits to maintain their licenses to practice law, and private sector sources of training can be costly in terms of class fees and travel. The training also may not directly relate to peculiar issues in federal procurement, labor and employment, administrative and military law and very few of these classes are beneficial to paraprofessionals.
LETS affords DLA legal professionals the opportunity to get earn CLE credits free and also allows the training to be tailored to the topics in areas of interest to federal practitioners. All the breakout topics were selected based on feedback from attorneys and paralegals across the DLA legal enterprise. It also allowed these legal professionals the opportunity to network with their peers.