Presidents Respond to Open Door Challenge And Extend Challenge to NCBA Membership

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of North Carolina Lawyer Magazine. Read the complete article written by Russell Rawlings and view all NC Lawyer issues at ncbar.org/nc-lawyer.

The official launch of the campaign to endow the Open Door Fund of the North Carolina Bar Foundation at the NCBA Annual Meeting included announcement of the $100,000 Presidents’ Challenge.

The Presidents’ Challenge came about during the “quiet phase” of the campaign, when Open Door Fund Co-Chairs Mark Holt and Caryn McNeill were reaching out to fellow NCBA + NCBF Past Presidents seeking their support of the $1 million fundraising drive.

Greeted with a resounding “yes,” the internal campaign to raise $100,000 in gifts and pledges commenced in earnest with a helping hand from Past President Catharine Arrowood.

“Personally, I was completely inspired by the Open Door program and wanted to support it,” Arrowood said. “If you think about someone who has announced they want to be a doctor, and they’ve never set foot in a medical practice or a hospital training room or anything like that, you can see they come to that profession at a significant disadvantage.

“The same thing is true with lawyers. Somebody announces they want to go to law school, and they’ve never had a lawyer who was a member of their family, they’ve never been in a law office, they’ve never been in an in-house counsel office, etcetera, and they come in at a significant disadvantage.

“What this program is designed to do is to help bridge that gap and provide an experience level and exposure to the profession that one would not otherwise get.”

Growing up in Robeson County, Arrowood had the advantage of living under the same roof with an icon of the bar. Her father, the late I. Murchison Biggs, practiced law in Lumberton for more than 50 years and was an inductee of the NCBA General Practice (now Legal Practice) Hall of Fame.