Newsroom - April 2009

Marbury Rainer is beginning the third year of a three year term as a member of the Meritas Board of Directors. Parker Hudson has been a member of Meritas since 2002. Meritas currently has 166 member firms with 272 locations and almost 7,000 total attorneys. Meritas firms are located in 99 U.S. cities and 66 countries around the world. As a board member Marbury attends three board meetings a year, including the Board Meeting held in conjunction with Meritas' Annual Meeting. He has attended board meetings in a number of U.S. cities along with meetings held in Amsterdam, Tokyo and Guadalajara, Mexico. The foreign board meetings are scheduled to coincide with regional meetings. Thus, the Amsterdam meeting was held along with the European Regional Meeting, the Tokyo meeting was with the Asian Regional Meeting and the Guadalajara meeting was held with the Latin American Regional Meeting. The Meritas Board is responsible for setting overall policies of the organization, reviewing potential new firms, taking final action regarding issues that may develop with current member firms, and overseeing the finances of the organization. In the last year, the Meritas Board has spent many hours discussing and adopting a new strategic plan, which was finalized at board meetings held in February, 2009 in Guadalajara and the Board meeting held with the Annual Meeting in Orlando in May of this year. The primary benefits of Meritas membership are derived from giving member firms safe and responsive places to refer clients and providing member firms with a source of in-bound referrals from other member firms and certain "Meritas" clients. During the past 12 months, Parker Hudson has referred out 37 matters to Meritas firms and has received 33 in-bound matters.