Discover the value of life-long learning among defender practitioners at the Annual Conference. NLADA sets the standard for up-to-date innovative, interactive, faculty-intense training-skills sessions and workshops. Defender training is a key component of NLADA's mission to seek justice for all by providing high quality, cost efficient legal representation to indigent persons accused of committing crimes. Each of our defender sessions is led by an experienced and dynamic faculty, carefully selected for each topic based on their professional expertise.

NLADA's highly respected training provides defenders with the latest substantive information on laws and legal trends affecting their everyday practice in the defender community. The Annual Conference offers innovations in technology and management techniques and strategies plus opportunities to hone integral defender skills.

It is critical that the indigent defense community focus its attention on the challenges facing the right to counsel and access to justice, including:

• State and federal budget cuts to indigent defense programs have resulted in restrictions on hiring and training and have even led to staff layoffs
• Crushing caseloads make compliance with national performance and practice standards increasingly difficult - if not impossible
• The Supreme Court decision in Padilla v. Kentucky has stirred controversy within the criminal defense community about how to meet obligations of defense counsel to advise their clients about immigration and other collateral consequences
• The technology gap between defender offices and prosecutors and the courts place defenders at a functional and strategic disadvantage at trial and other critical stages of representation
• Mass incarceration resulting from aggressive criminal justice policies and law enforcement practices, including the War on Drugs, have had a devastating, disparate and long-term impact on communities of color

In order to meet these and other challenges, it is clear that the defense community must embrace new and different strategies. Defenders must reach out to different constituencies, including private and corporate bars, public interest lawyers, prosecutors, judges, law enforcement, the ecumenical community and others, in order to find common ground on issues, forge new alliances, and foster a spirit of collaboration on critical indigent defense issues. The Defender Track will offer sessions that will engage attendees to rethink strategies for addressing the current crisis to indigent defense , to rebuild and expand partnerships to meet these challenges, and retool staff and develop the next generation of leaders and advocates so that the promise of Gideon can finally be fulfilled.