Minnesota Lawyer
Messick Law, PLLC
When it comes to walking the walk about educating legal professionals on equity issues, family law attorney Jacquelyn Lutz is near the head of the class.
Working with the Family Law League, she helped start a 10-week, 20-hour course on lawyer racial equity training. She found the facilitator for the course, raised money for the reduction in participant costs and promoted the event across the family law bar. The course drew about 25 lawyers.
“I realized that if the people who were interested in this pooled their resources, including sponsors, we could get high-quality training at a reasonable cost,” said Lutz. “It took some work, but it turned out great.”
An associate at Messick Law, PLLC in Woodbury, Lutz has continued to find future educational opportunities for lawyers in diversity and equity areas.
She has taken the lead putting together an education initiative for attorneys for an eight-hour cultural training on American Indian populations.
This course is designed to study Federal Indian policy, intergenerational trauma, traditional health in American Indian communities, and allyship. Thus far, she has recruited the facilitator and has drummed attendees and sponsors for the training course, which is underway and will go through the fall. The idea is to expand knowledge, understanding and advocacy for issues faced by American Indian communities in Minnesota and across the country.
“I talked to the leadership of our firm and said, ‘OK — how do we keep this going?’” Lutz said. “I got connected with the Minnesota Indian Women Resource Center and let them know that we wanted something that was specific to the local Indigenous population. The idea was to touch on both legal and cultural aspects faced by that community.”
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