Dear Alumni Friends:

As the new president of the University of South Carolina's Law School Alumni Association (LSAA), it is with extreme pleasure and great enthusiasm that I wish to invite you to participate in this year's activities and agenda. I extend our well wishes and extreme gratitude to Cathy Dunn for her extraordinary leadership over the last year and a half. We also thank Dean Powell for his leadership and his many accomplishments in service to the Alumni Association, the law school community, and the South Carolina Bar. In addition, we acknowledge his efforts to re-energize the campaign to build a new law school building.

The upcoming year promises to be exciting and eventful. We are excited that our new law school building is finally becoming a reality and that the building campaign committee will be deliberate in calling on our alumni, the legislature, and corporate donors to support this major effort. We have also planned several events to keep you more involved with the law school.

As we venture into the new school year, I intend to ensure that you are timely informed of and have an opportunity to participate in the major events at the law school, to stress more visibility of the LSAA, to maintain a collaborative relationship with the South Carolina Bar and other bar organizations, and to increase opportunities for alumni and students to interact with joint sponsorship of social events.

We hope you will join us for Homecoming and Reunion Weekend. This year LSAA's big project is to host a CLE program as part of the weekend's activities. The event, a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, is a symposium featuring several national speakers. It will be held at the new Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center on Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, and will be followed by the annual alumni dinner and awards ceremony for the Compleat Lawyer award recipients. The program promises to be fun and educational, and will bring lots of recognition to the LSAA and the School of Law. For more information, visit www.law.sc.edu/votingrights/.

We are here to serve you and keep you informed of the progress of the school! Let us know how you would like to become involved.

With best regards,

J. Michelle Childs, President, USC Law School Alumni Association

J. Michelle Childs earned both her MA and JD degrees from the University of South Carolina in 1991. She received the Compleat Lawyer Silver Medallion Award in 1997.

Formerly a partner with the firm of Nexsen, Pruet, Jacobs & Pollard, LLP, in Columbia, Childs practiced in the area of employment law and general litigation. She served as deputy director for the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation's Division of Labor, where her work included administering programs concerned with wages and child labor, labor/management mediation, migrant labor, and Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) programs. She has been certified as a specialist in employment and labor law by the South Carolina Supreme Court. Along with serving on the South Carolina Board of Law Examiners, she was appointed by Governor Jim Hodges as a Workers' Compensation Commissioner to serve a six-year term, which began in July 2002.

Childs has been very active with local, state, and national bar organizations, and community organizations. She has received numerous awards, including recently being named by The State newspaper as one of the "Top 20 Under 40" successful persons in South Carolina. Childs also was a recipient of the 2005 USC Moore School of Business Outstanding Young Alumni Award.