Leading AILA: Beyond our 75th Year

This blog post is part of a months-long series leading up to the formal celebration of AILA’s 75^th year at the upcoming Annual Conference in New York City, June, 2022.

I serve as AILA’s president as we celebrate it’s 75 years of existence, starting from a small group of 20 in New York City to our more than 16,000 member attorneys, professors, and law students today. I feel very much like a small fish in a big pond, but as our first Black and first openly gay president, I am also aware of being front and center in a way that allows me to expand our understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion so any one of our thousands of members can hopefully see they too could lead AILA one day.

I’ve shared before about my personal journey here to this leadership position but what I wanted to share with you in this post is the chance to ‘meet’ the amazing leaders from AILA’s recent and long ago past. The place to meet them, other than in NYC next year of course, is our 75^th anniversary website. Right now you can find a video in which I interview Bob Juceam, a past president and true treasure of AILA. You can also watch both our 70^th anniversary video and our 60^th to get a sense of those momentous occasions.

Further you can take a look at our AILA timeline and look back at your favorite memories of AILA.

We’ll be asking many other AILA leaders to share their perspectives over the coming months, because each and every one of us have our own unique insights about what AILA has meant to us, and what we can look forward to in our organizations’ future.

If you would like to share your personal take, we’d love to have you share it with us for the blog in written or video format, just reach out to AILA’s comms team at commsteam@aila.org. If you’d rather share a shorter memory or note, there’s a spot for that on the 75^th page as well.

Thank you for the support that allowed me to come to this place of leadership, thank you for the time you give to our pro bon efforts and all the other amazing things you do. Thank you for joining me in celebrating AILA’s 75^th year and our future together.

by Allen Orr