President’s Letter

Hello CALL members!

It seems like we were just at the May Business Meeting, but we blinked and here we are in September already! For CALL and the legal community, September is always a period of new starts — new students, new attorneys, new committees, and me, the new President of CALL! As we start what I hope will be another great year at CALL, I want to take time to thank all the members who stepped up to the siren song of committee work. We have a great roster of Committee Chairs and new committee members. As always, we are an organization of volunteers, and I greatly appreciate the many hours our members dedicate to create the educational programming, social events, networking, and service that define our organization. To our new(er) members who want to be involved and don’t know where to start, there’s still time to join a committee or reach out for a mentor. Drop me a line, I’m happy to chat!

Speaking of new, we have a lot of changes and initiatives planned for the upcoming year. Last year, our Strategic Planning Committee finalized our new Strategic Plan that will take us through the dawn of 2022.  It is available on the CALL website, and I encourage everyone to take a good hard look. When I hear someone say 2022, it seems light years away (to me, at least), but our committees are already working on aligning their programs and committee engagement to meet our strategic goals.

We’ve also decided that it’s time to change up some of our technology and procedures here at CALL. Due to pricing and functionality restraints, we have switched to a new membership management platform. Since 2016, CALL has used Wild Apricot for our membership and event registration, but this August we switched to a non-stone-fruit-based system, NeonCRM. Like new students struggling with printers, keycards and citation formats, there will be a learning curve with the new system, but we’re hopeful that it will streamline our registration and renewals and will be a benefit to all our members. Please be patient with us as we work out the kinks!  Many of you got your  first look at Neon when the September Business Meeting registration went out. Neon also replaces Survey Monkey as our non-primate-based survey tool, and it has many reporting features we hope will be useful in evaluating our membership and programming.

It was great to see so many CALL colleagues at AALL in D.C. this summer. Eight different panels and presentations at AALL featured CALL members. The topics presented included analytics, instruction, alerts, outreach, training, and contract negotiation. I was fortunate to attend the majority of these presentations, and I can say that they were all a great representation of the skills and expertise of our members!

I know that many of our committees already have programs, networking, and social events planned for the upcoming year. The first business meeting will be held September 19, at Wild Fire (159 W. Erie). I hope to see many of you there, and I look forward to working with all of you this year!