ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Hon. Cynthia D. Kinser, Kinser Law PLC / Pennington Gap
Cynthia Kinser was the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia. Her seventeen years of distinguished service to the Court ended with her retirement in 2014. She joined the Kinser Law PLC firm in 2018. In 2015, she joined Gentry Locke as Senior Counsel, where she focused on appeals, criminal matters, and government investigations. Before serving on the Supreme Court of Virginia, Justice Kinser served as a Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee for the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia. She later was appointed a United States Magistrate Judge for that court and served in that capacity for seven years. Prior to her tenure on the federal district court, she enjoyed being a solo practitioner in Pennington Gap, Virginia. Justice Kinser also served for four years as the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Lee County, where she lives and maintains a cattle farm to this day.
Monica T. Monday, Gentry Locke / Roanoke
Monica T. Monday is the managing partner of Gentry Locke, where she heads the firm’s appellate practice group. Prior to joining Gentry Locke, she clerked for the Honorable Lawrence L. Koontz, Jr., who was then Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, and is now a Senior Justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia. Ms. Monday has handled over one hundred appeals, and frequently lectures and writes on appellate issues. She currently chairs the Appellate Practice Committee of the Virginia State Bar Litigation Section, and serves on the Fourth Circuit Rules Advisory Committee and the Virginia Bar Association’s Appellate Practice Section Council. Ms. Monday is a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, the Virginia Law Foundation, the Roanoke Bar Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation. She is a member of the Judicial Council of Virginia, the Boyd-Graves Conference, the Virginia Model Jury Instruction Committee, and the Virginia State Bar Professionalism Course faculty. She is a former board member of the Virginia Bar Association, the Association of Defense Attorneys, and the Virginia Law Foundation. She is a member of the Virginia Workers’ Compensation American Inn of Court and is a Master of the Bench and former secretary in the Ted Dalton American Inn of Court. Ms. Monday is a graduate of the College of William & Mary and the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary. In the 1991 National Moot Court Competition, her law school moot court team took first place and won the best brief award, and she won the individual award for best appellate advocate.