The Local Bar Leaders Conference began with a theme of second chances. “The last time I saw Judge (Richard G. Kopf), my daughter was running off with the gavel he used to sentence me,” Shon Hopwood said during the opening luncheon. Hopwood’s first stint with the law began with a 10-year stint in federal prison after he was convicted and sentenced by Kopf in 1998 for robbing banks in Nebraska. Backed by a prison law library and a determination to find ways to reduce his sentence, Hopwood became an unlikely, go-to law expert behind bars, preparing cases for fellow inmates and being granted certiorari petitions twice by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since his release, he earned a law degree in Washington State, clerked for Judge Janice Rogers Brown at the D.C. Circuit, and is now a professor of law at Georgetown University. Hopwood’s talk at the luncheon rode on a theme of rehabilitation and redemption, calling for bar associations to consider admitting into practice people like him who have turned it around. “It’s incumbent upon lawyers to look at this differently.”