On July 31, IFLG Founding Partner Rich Vaughn will be sworn in as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Family Law Section. For those who have watched him shape this field and this firm, the appointment feels less like a surprise and more like the profession catching up to his life’s work.

Rich previously chaired the Section’s Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology, where he helped develop model legislation to guide states in regulating ART providers, donor programs, and surrogacy agencies. His move from that committee to the Section’s broader leadership is a meaningful progression. It places a lawyer who has built his career in assisted reproduction at the head of one of the ABA’s most influential sections.

The Family Law Section has long addressed the areas of law that touch people most directly: marriage and its dissolution, custody, adoption, parentage, and the well-being of children. Rich entered ART law during its formative years, after the earliest pioneers had begun clearing the path, but before the field had developed the broader legal framework and professional standards it has today. His leadership now reflects both his professional arc and the continued evolution of family law itself.

A practice grounded in lived experience

Rich understands this work from the inside. He and his husband, Tommy Woelfel, became parents to twin sons, Aiden and Austin, through egg donation and surrogacy, and that experience is what pulled him fully into fertility law. He studied law at Loyola University Chicago in the early 1990s, then spent a decade in business, technology, and contract law before fatherhood redirected his career. He founded International Fertility Law Group to focus exclusively on assisted reproduction, and in the years since, he has helped thousands of intended parents around the world create their families.

That history informs the way IFLG practices. Assisted reproduction asks a great deal of everyone it touches, and the families who trust us with this process are usually in the most hopeful, most uncertain stretch of their lives. Rich has helped intended parents, surrogates, and donors work through the tangle of parentage and legal recognition across borders, with a clear understanding that behind every legal question is a family trying to come into being.

Why this appointment matters

Family law no longer fits inside one shape. The families it serves have grown to include not only those struggling with infertility, but same-sex couples building families through surrogacy and donation, single parents by choice, blended families, and parents working across borders to bring a child home. Each path raises legal and ethical questions that the law has not always answered clearly or quickly.

Leadership in this space requires more than applying existing law. It requires the ability to anticipate how family formation is changing and to help the law move responsibly toward them.

Rich has spent his career doing exactly that. He helped found the first International Surrogacy Symposium at Cambridge University, has written and spoken widely on ART law, and has stood with LGBTQ+ parents since long before legal recognition of their families could be taken for granted. His chairmanship gives that perspective a larger platform. It brings to the Section a leader who has lived many of the questions modern families face.

For the ART community, this appointment carries particular weight. It marks the first time an attorney whose career has centered on assisted reproductive technology law will chair the ABA Family Law Section. That milestone signals something larger: ART has moved from the margins of family law to the center of its future.

For intended parents, surrogates, donors, clinics, agencies, and the professionals who work alongside them, Rich’s leadership means the issues at the heart of assisted reproduction now sit firmly within the national conversation about where family law is headed.

What this means at IFLG

Inside the firm, this moment feels personal in a way a press release cannot quite capture. Rich built IFLG around a conviction he still carries every day: that families deserve to form safely, ethically, and with dignity, no matter what their composition or where they are built.

Watching him bring that conviction to a national stage makes us proud, but it also reminds us why we do this work. His leadership has shaped the standard we hold ourselves to – doing excellent work and delivering it with kindness, case by case and client by client, and it deepens our commitment to every family who comes to us looking for a path forward.

Congratulations, Rich. This is a moment worth marking, earned over decades of work that asked for no credit, before the broader profession fully understood how much this field would matter.

And though this is a momentous accomplishment for Rich, our firm, and the field of ART law, the true benefactors are the intended parents, surrogates, donors, and, ultimately, the children created. They have always been our point of focus and always will be.

With admiration and appreciation,

Ken Mosesian
CEO, International Fertility Law Group

The IFLG Team