Where Trial Lawyers Come to Breathe: The Petersens at the ISOB Annual Meeting in Hawaii
- March 15, 2026
- PetersenLegal
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Nobody tells you, when you decide to become a trial lawyer, what it will actually cost you.
The years of preparation before a single opening statement. The weight of carrying someone else’s most devastating experience into a courtroom and being responsible for what happens next. The verdicts that go the right way — and the ones that don’t, that stay with you long after the jury files out. The relentless pace of a profession that asks everything and rarely gives you formal permission to stop.
Susan and Todd Petersen know that cost intimately. And they know, just as intimately, the value of a place that gives you permission to put it down for a while.
That place is the International Society of Barristers.
More Than an Honor Society
The ISOB is, by any measure, one of the most prestigious organizations in American law. It is an honor society of outstanding trial lawyers, chosen by their peers on the basis of excellence and integrity in advocacy. Its mission — to preserve trial by jury, the adversary system, and the independence of the judiciary — places it at the very foundation of civil justice in this country.
But if you asked Susan or Todd what makes ISOB irreplaceable, they wouldn’t start with the credentials.
They’d tell you about the conversations. About sitting with friends from Canada and South Carolina and Louisiana and places far beyond U.S. borders, talking not about motions or discovery or appellate strategy, but about art. About mental health. About the world and the things in it that make the work worth doing. About how to take care of yourself so you can keep taking care of your clients.
The ISOB, they would tell you, is a place to bind your wounds. To unplug. To remember that you are a whole person — not just a lawyer.
Hawaii: The Perfect Backdrop
This year’s Annual Meeting was held in Hawaii, and there is something about the islands that has a way of softening even the most seasoned litigator. The ocean. The warmth. The unhurried pace that stands in such beautiful contrast to the courtroom. Surrounded by that setting, with friends they’ve known for years and new ones they were only just meeting, Susan and Todd found what they always find at ISOB: genuine belonging.
This is a community where it doesn’t matter whether you represent plaintiffs or defendants. What matters is the kind of lawyer you are. The kind of person. The values you bring into the room — and the integrity you carry out of it.
Susan’s Role: Welcoming 21 New Members Home
This year, Susan had the distinct honor of serving as National Membership Co-Chair — a role at the heart of what makes ISOB endure across generations.
After a rigorous process of peer and judicial review, 20-plus exceptional attorneys were selected for induction into the Society. Each chosen for excellence. Each chosen for integrity. Each now part of a community that will be there for them not just professionally, but personally — through the hard cases, the hard years, and all the moments in between.
Most of them don’t know it just yet, but they are about to find a new home with amazing conversation and friendship.
A Gathering of Women: For International Women’s Day
Among the most treasured moments of the Annual Meeting was a special gathering Susan organized for the women members of the ISOB. In a community already defined by excellence, this room carried its own particular electricity.
These are women who have earned their place in one of the most selective legal organizations in the world through the quality of their work and the strength of their character. Women who have walked into courtrooms around the world and fought — fiercely, skillfully, relentlessly — for people who needed them.
In Hawaii, they gathered simply to be together. To laugh. To share. To pour into each other the way they pour into their clients every day.
The gathering took place in the week of International Women’s Day — a coincidence that felt anything but coincidental. It was, quietly and beautifully, a celebration of how far the legal profession has come and a testament to the women who helped bring it there.
Coming Home
Susan and Todd returned from Hawaii the way they always return from ISOB: full. Energized. Deeply grateful for a community that has given them so much more than professional development.
It has given them friendships that span the globe. Conversations that have changed how they think. A safe place to be human in a profession that doesn’t always make that easy. And it has deepened, every single year, their commitment to the values that brought them to trial law in the first place — the belief that every person deserves a fair day in court, and that the right to a jury trial is worth protecting with everything you have.
That is the International Society of Barristers.
And it is, without question, home.
Next stop: Puglia, Italy, 2027. 🇮🇹⚖️
Learn more about ISOB here: https://www.isob.com/