Reflections on 2025 and Beyond
As we prepare to celebrate the WLA’s 65th anniversary in 2026, our board has pondered how we build on what our founders started in 1961 and get where we want to be. We began 2025 with this question: what is the role of the women’s bar in 2025? How do we ensure that this organization is serving its members, is being intentional and strategic to address our biggest challenges, and is empowering and advancing all women?
We embarked on this journey by first revamping our mission statement to ensure that it articulated our goals to empower and advance all women, provide meaningful access to legal systems, create inclusion in community events, and find success and intersectional equity in the profession. As we embraced our new mission statement this year, the board is proud to have doubled participation at nearly all of our events.
As part of this process, we worked to refresh the WLA’s brand. The board is proud to unveil our new logo, which more clearly communicates our values and mission. The continuous line in the “W” represents the ideas of connection, overlap, and networking. It reflects the dynamic relationships and supportive community at the heart of the WLA and emphasizes that balance, growth, and connection are ongoing processes within our professional and inclusive network. We chose the color purple for its historic connection to the women’s suffrage movement and feminist movements throughout history, representing the power and ambition of women.
We also revamped our website, which will improve our communication and the WLA community’s access to resources. One of the most important roles we can play is to connect people and groups, including those who are doing already great work to build community. This increases our capacity to do bigger and better things. Our new site will help us do just that and includes this blog to give women lawyers opportunities to share their expertise and ideas. When you consider strategies to promote your work, reach out to the WLA to help. Not only do we want to publish you and give you a platform to present at our events, but we also want sponsor and co-host events together and develop content and programming together.
At our Annual Meeting this year, we are thrilled to celebrate Chief Justice Debra Hembree Lambert, Kentucky’s first female chief justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky. The election of a woman to the highest judicial seat in the commonwealth is an important milestone but also reminds us that our work to advance women in the profession is not finished. I am so grateful to our 2025 WLA Board of Directors and am excited to see where our incoming board, led by our new president, Emily Logan, will take us next year.
