We want to introduce our new project, which resulted from the Foundation of the Association of Legal Administrators, and a new program they introduced: the Growing Seeds Program. The Cyber Chapter is excited to be one of the recipients of the program’s inaugural year. The Foundation of the ALA is the charitable affiliate of the Association of Legal Administrators. The mission of the Foundation is to help educate, mentor, and inspire current and future legal management professionals in inclusive ways to foster development and increase awareness of the profession within the legal industry.
- The Susan L. French Emerging Leader Fellowship Program
- Student Scholarship and Visibility
- David W. Brezina Memorial Session at the Annual Conference
- Growing Seeds Program
For more information on the Foundation of ALA, please visit these sites: www.alanet.org/about/foundation-of-ala
Here is a synopsis of our vision.
The Cyber Chapter will host a blog/vlog aimed at non-attorney legal administrators on best practices, administrative efficiencies, legal news/updates, and personal stories with monthly episodes. We plan to advance and reflect the Foundation of ALA’s mission to educate, mentor, and inspire future and current legal management professionals by encouraging professional development, fostering community, enhancing knowledge, and inspiring students interested in legal administration.
The objectives of this project are to create content featuring diverse voices from the legal administration field, achieve exposure to the field, our Chapter, and ALA as a whole, encourage engagement through comments, questions, and suggestions for future topics, and highlight successful mentorship stories from the ALA ambassador program and/or Chapter Mentor programs.
The expected outcomes would be increased awareness of the field of legal administration as well as ALA, skill development related to legal administration and inspire community among current and future legal administrative professionals, which could also grow involvement in ALA, our parent organization.
We want to provide easily digestible resources and administrative practices, provide best practices, emerging trends, and essential skills (by promoting educational opportunities of the chapter as well as ALA, much like what we receive from ALA annual conference, but on an ongoing basis), offer mentoring opportunities in addition to ALA’s Ambassador program and Chapter Mentor programs, enhance our virtual membership platform by fostering connections and guidance, highlight various roles, responsibilities, and success stories, inspiring viewers to explore these paths as well as ALA, and continuing to build on ALA’s community. This project would address the educational gap by providing tailored content that speaks directly to the needs of non-lawyer legal administrators, often overlooked in traditional legal education, equipping viewers with knowledge and resources, helping build on ALA’s role to significantly impact the professional landscape for non-lawyer legal administrators and encourage growth in the field.
The anticipated long-term/sustained impact of this project would include growth in the non-lawyer legal administrator field, which could also potentially increase membership in ALA and the Cyber Chapter. We would love to see other Chapters follow suit. Additionally, we would like to invite high schools, trade schools, and colleges to offer it as a resource, especially in areas without a land-based ALA chapter.
