President's Message

As I sit down to write my final President’s Message, I am filled with a number of emotions.  First, excitement.  As of September 1, 2018, Heather Stern will become WLALA’s 99th President.  Heather is a truly amazing woman and lawyer.  She is wicked smart, practical, kind, capable and passionate.  She is exactly the kind of woman that we want leading WLALA.  She will formally be installed on September 20, 2018 at WLALA Awards and Installation Dinner where we will honor Hon. Beverly Reid O’Connell (1965-2017), Hon. Sandra R. Klein with the Distinguished Service Award and the CBRE Legal Department.  I hope that you will join us for this special event and celebration of woman lawyers.

I am also feeling sad.  For the past six years I have served on the WLALA Executive Committee.  The Executive Committee meets monthly and has almost daily email or phone correspondence regarding a number of issues necessary to running WLALA and WLALA Foundation.  The result is inevitable friendships and mentorship with some of the best people I have ever known.  I have been blessed to work on past Executive Committees with Ruth Kahn, Anne Tremblay, Jennifer Romano, and Stacy Horth-Neubert, and to work on the current Executive Committee with Heather Stern, Jennifer Leland, Michelle Abidoye, Jessica Kronstadt and Mary McKelvey.  While our friendships will no doubt endure, I will no longer get to spend as much time with my friends working on running this organization.  For this, I am truly sad.

Finally, I am feeling a whole lot of pride.  I am very proud of what we have accomplished this year and how we have set WLALA and WLALA Foundation on a continued course of relevancy and success.  My theme this year was “Be The Change.”  I think WLALA succeeded in presenting programs that hopefully inspired each of our members to work toward solutions addressing several of the most important issues we face today including, the quest for equal pay, sexual harassment, discrimination, and bias in the workplace, and threats to our civil and reproductive rights.  I hope that each of you will continue to be the change that you want to see in the world and inspire others to do the same.  Together, we WILL make a difference and change the world in a way that will benefit the next generation.