The new year is off to a great start. Our committee’s name change has enthusiastically been approved, so we are officially now the Women Lawyers' Committee ("WLC")

As incoming chair, I would like to thank you all for being one of our approximately 3,000 highly valued members with whom we aim to engage and network.

Below I will outline officer changes, vision and goals for WLC for 2022.

A warm thank you to our outgoing Immediate Past Chair, Charandeep Kaur and Chair, Patricia Menendez-Cambo, for their valuable work as officers, and in particular for the solid base on which we are able to build.

Amongst other long-standing officers, I would also like to introduce you to our newly approved senior officers, consisting of Vice Chair, Jennifer Bishop, Co-Vice Chairs Dominika Stepinska-Duch and Clara-Ann Gordon and myself as Chair. We work closely on spearheading the officers' joint wish to bring our committee’s efforts to a new level.

I also want to warmly welcome two new officers to our committee, namely our Scholarship Officer, Shamilah Grimwood-Norley, and our Networking Officer, Tamar Krongrad. With these wonderful additions to WLC, we have also reached our goal of global presence amongst the officers. In other words, we are more than happy to engage worldwide!

In addition to the new Committee name, we have been working on a sharpened focus for WLC. We wanted our aspiration to be clear and also to stretch ourselves for the benefit of all women lawyers around the world so that we can have a shared set of values and beliefs as a common goal. Our new vision is:

"The main aspiration for the Women Lawyers’ Committee (WLC) is the empowerment of women lawyers to achieve a level playing field in the legal profession and to inspire leaders in the legal profession to create a level playing field in order to achieve gender parity."

Working towards this aspiration, we have set out four key goals:

1) Empowerment

2) Business topics

3) Networking

4) Public policy matters.

To that end, we have outlined several projects. Just to name a few, we are working on a mentoring toolkit to empower women lawyers as well as the launch of a virtual networking café.

Moreover, we are working on a WLC conference to be held in Copenhagen this fall. First time in four years… so please save the dates! It will hopefully be held 11th - 13th of September 2022. The social program starts Sunday afternoon and the conference ends Tuesday afternoon.

Let me close by thanking each of you for your commitment and support to WLC. We look forward to engaging with you virtually and even more so in person sometime soon!

Warmest regards,

Lise Lotte Hjerrild

Chair, IBA Women Lawyers’ Committee