Colin E Callender, QC, managing partner of The Bahamas’ oldest law firm, Callenders & Co, was elected a director of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers (IATL) at the annual meeting in New York recently, becoming one of only five attorneys in the world outside the United States to hold a current directorship.

Callender, whose law career has spanned five decades, called the appointment “one of the highest honours of my career and a reflection of the respect with which the legal profession of The Bahamas is held at the global level.”

The IATL is reserved for “the elite” among litigators–those attorneys and barristers who fight for clients in the courtroom. Its membership is by invitation only and limited to 500 lawyers admitted to fellowship after a grueling screening process that includes reviews by judges and respected academic and practicing legal authorities or experts.

No other Bahamian has ever been named a director of the academy.

Considered to be one of the Bahamas’ leading experts in insolvency, Callender is the great-grandson of the firm’s founder, W E S Callender, and was educated at the Taunton School in Somerset, England. He was admitted to the Bar of England and Wales (Middle Temple) in July 1962, and admitted to The Bahamas Bar one month later. He also holds membership in the International Bar Association and The Bahamas Bar Association.

In 2010, Callender was admitted to the Inner Bar as Queen’s Counsel.