Jeff Grant has a line he uses for the thing he is trying to end. “Every sentence should have a period.”
The sentence he means is the one that keeps running after the judge’s does: the closed bank accounts, the job applications that go nowhere, the reputation that a search engine refreshes every morning. The White Collar Support Group calls it the white collar life sentence, and it is the theme of the group’s third annual conference, which convenes online on Saturday, October 10, from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern.
Grant founded the support group in 2013 and is, by the organization’s description, the only attorney in the country who served federal prison time for a white collar crime and returned to practice white collar law. The group runs free weekly Zoom meetings and says it has served roughly 2,000 members. It operates as a program of Progressive Prison Ministries, a 501(c)(3) that Grant and Lynn Grant founded the same year. The conference began in 2024, when the weekly conversations were opened up to a larger room. Across the first two events, the organizers say, thousands attended and ten recorded sessions were published free.
The conference describes itself as the national gathering for the entire white collar justice community, and it means the whole of it: the justice-impacted, their families, and the attorneys who defend them.
The keynote is a deputy director who did time
The 2026 keynote is Joshua J. Smith, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. According to the conference, Smith is the first person appointed to senior Bureau leadership after serving time in its custody. He now oversees 122 facilities, 36,000 staff, and the care of more than 156,000 people, and he founded the Fourth Purpose Foundation and Prison Life Media.
That is a different kind of keynote from the two that preceded it. The 2024 inaugural conference, themed “Starting Over: Out of Isolation and Into Community,” was keynoted by David Israel, founder of GOOD PLANeT Foods. The 2025 conference, on pardons and expungement, was keynoted by the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon. This year the person at the top of the program is inside the system that the audience has been through, at the level where policy is made.
The fireside chat
The fireside guest is Dickie Scruggs, whose name will be familiar to anyone who followed the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. The conference describes him as the lead counsel behind settlements worth more than $248 billion, a lawyer who reached the top of the profession and then served six years in federal prison. Today he leads 2nd Chance MS, which the conference says has helped more than a thousand Mississippi adults earn the credentials to rebuild their futures.
He will be interviewed by Brent Cassity, host of the Nightmare Success podcast and a member of the support group, who draws on his own path through the federal system to lead the conversation.
Two panels
The first panel, at 10:45 a.m., is “Rebuilding Your Career After a Justice Journey,” moderated by Drew Chapin of The Discoverability Company, who sits on the conference steering committee. The three panelists each rebuilt in public:
- Emily O’Brien, founder and CEO of Comeback Snacks, a Canadian snack company that hires people with justice-system experience. She served time in federal prison and built the brand afterward.
- Rashmi Airan, a Columbia Law graduate and former Wall Street dealmaker who went through federal prison and now speaks and consults on leading through adversity. Her story has been covered by ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
- Desmond Meade, who led the campaign that amended Florida’s constitution to restore voting rights to more than 1.4 million people with past felony convictions. He was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2019 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
The second panel, at 11:30 a.m., is the one that gives the conference its edge. Its full title is “The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life.” The conference’s own description puts the problem plainly: clemency asks something of the person seeking it that no other legal process does. Tell us again, in your own words, about the worst thing you ever did.
Gregg Johnson of FocalPoint Business Coaching moderates. The confirmed panelists are Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and former federal prosecutor who founded the nation’s first law-school clinic devoted to federal commutations, and whose Clemency Resource Center produced 96 commutations under the Obama clemency initiative; and Alexander Neumeister, an Austrian-American physician-scientist with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications who now oversees gene therapy clinical programs at AskBio. A third panelist had not been announced as of this writing.
The program also includes shorter presentations on online reputation management from Chapin and on restitution and remission from Tanya Pierce, founder of Life Unbolted, before closing reflections at noon.
What it costs and who is paying for it
The conference is virtual, on Zoom, and open to anyone. Tickets are sold through Eventbrite. As of September 9, 2026, the conference’s own listing put them between $12.51 and $23.18.
The lead sponsor is the law firm Paul Weiss. The supporting sponsors run to more than two dozen and say something about who shows up to this event: the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section, the Women’s White Collar Defense Association, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the Fortune Society, the Legal Action Center, the Center for Community Alternatives, several defense firms and accounting practices, a federal prison consultant, and two podcasts hosted by people who have been through the system.
Why it matters beyond the white collar world
It would be easy to read this as a conference for a narrow and relatively comfortable slice of the justice-impacted population. The program argues otherwise. Restoring the vote to 1.4 million Floridians was not a white collar project. Neither is the clemency process, or the question of what a person owes after the sentence is served and what the world owes back.
The support group’s own history is the better argument. It started as a few people on a weekly call because nobody else was talking to them. Thirteen years later it is a national event with a Bureau of Prisons deputy director at the podium. That is what happens when the people inside a problem decide to organize it themselves.
Registration and the full program are at whitecollarconference.com.