President’s Message

Hello CALA members and Business Partners and welcome to the 2020/2021 CALA term!  We hope this message finds you all healthy and adjusting well to our everchanging circumstances.

We certainly have an interesting year ahead and our new slate of CALA Board Members are ready to get to work!  In June, we held our full-day annual Strategic Planning session (social distance guidelines followed, of course) to plan for the upcoming year.  While we must acknowledge that we do face some challenges, we feel that we will be able to plan quality professional development, educational and networking events.  Like everyone, we have had to pivot and adjust to our new environment, this means thinking outside the box and looking for new and exciting ways to engage you.

Due to the pandemic, we had to cancel this year’s annual AGM and held a virtual election to vote in our new Board Members.  This meant you didn’t get to hear from last year’s Board with our annual update, so I wanted to share a few highlights here:

  • CALA is proud to again be the recipient of the President’s Award of Excellence – This is awarded to chapters who take action in support of ALA’s mission to improve the quality of management in law firms and other legal service organizations; and represent professional legal management and managers to the legal community and to the community at large.
  • We implemented our new, sleek, easy to use CALA website
  • We increased membership by 20 new members

We hosted the following events:

  • Full day CALA Conference (with multiple speakers and a vendor’s hall)
  • Annual Golf Tournament
  • Community Challenge at Soup Sisters and we collected $840 from mulligans sold at the Golf Tournament for Charity
  • 7 social/networking events
  • 3 very successful educational events

Soon we will be hosting a virtual event and after that, we are planning an in-person Happy Hour, it will be great to see some of you again!  Of course, these events are possible due to the incredible support provided to us by our Business Partners, we look forward to reconnecting with them as well.

And finally, we agreed that we should have a theme for our year ahead and that theme is “Expect the Unexpected”, it seemed quite fitting.

I am excited to serve as President and am grateful to get to work with such committed and experienced Executive Board members, Subsection Chairs, Committee members and Volunteers.  I would like to extend my thanks to all Past Presidents for helping to build such a successful Chapter, I know I have big shoes to fill and may lean on your experience from time-to-time.

Here’s to an excellent 2020/2021 season!

Sincerely,
Andrea Boyle
2020-2021 CALA President



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