Farewell 2016…It was a Good Year!

California fared better than the nation in this election, and OCTLA has had a great year

2016 December

As 2016 comes to an end, we finally experienced the end of arguably the most acrimonious “history-making election” of our lifetime. And though the result is not one most of us expected, it is a result we will have to learn to live with. And for many of us, that is going to be tough, because an unexpected loss of this magnitude is a pretty hard pill to swallow. But we will recover — like we always do. We will evaluate what went wrong, make corrections, and soldier on.

Notwithstanding what happened on the national scene, Californians fared far better thanks to the efforts of our friends at CAOC along with the help of attorneys like you and me up and down the state. So that is something that we as Californians can be proud of and happy about.

Something to be even happier about is that my year as president of what I consider to be the best TLA in the state is ending on a note of unity and success! I am so very proud of our board and what we were able to accomplish for our membership during my short term. Taking a quick look back, we started the year launching our first legislative outreach, which resulted in great success. We set and attended several meetings with our local elected officials throughout Orange County in an effort to build lasting and strong relationships with them and to let them know that we are here as a resource for them if they ever had questions about legislation that could potentially affect our clients or our practices. Our incoming president has vowed to continue what our legislative committee started.

Orange County was also instrumental in the success of the 2016 CAOC-IE/ OCTLA Palm Spring MCLE Seminar! We were able to hold up our end of the bargain by getting 100 Orange County lawyers to attend the annual event, making it the most successful Palm Springs conference to date! It also set record numbers in attendance! I am so very proud of our members who participated in the event and look forward to seeing you all again next year.

Our new meeting start times seemed to resonate well with our membership as they continued to register and attend our monthly MCLE dinner meetings in record numbers. As usual, we continued our tradition of having speakers that our members want to see, discussing topics that were important to our members.

We also continued to put on “sold out” social events like our annual Golf Tournament and our Bowling Night, which was a huge success.

I am also proud of the charitable giving of our members. As you know by now, OCTLA chose Veterans Legal Institute (VLI) as its charity. In years past, our organization has been quite successful with raising money for the charities we have chosen. This year was no exception; however, this year we took our charitable giving a bit further and also donated of our time. Throughout the year, many of our members assisted our local veterans by either holding bi-monthly legal clinics offering pro bono services like SSDI; some donated their specific legal services to veterans individually; while other assisted VLI with a few hours of their time to help them with intake and processing.

Holiday luncheon December 9

OCTLA ends the year with our annual holiday luncheon at Original Mike’s in Santa Ana on December 9. It will be the last time we get together before the new president takes the reins. Before the year escapes me totally, I want to take this time to say thank you to each and every one of our members for allowing me to lead this organization. It has been a privilege and an honor to do so. And I want to thank the board for all of its fantastic and hard work. The success of my presidency is because of the admirable efforts of these women and men. Shaina Colover is our next president and she is poised and ready to carry on the tradition of excellence.