A Welcome to GAWL

Welcome to The Georgia Association for Women Lawyers! GAWL will be celebrating its 80th anniversary this year.  On May 8th, Lee Wallace (pictured on left) tendered the gavel to Christian Torgrimson (pictured on right) to lead GAWL as its 80th President. All members of GAWL are appreciative of Lee's dedicated, positive, and visionary leadership and look forward to supporting Christian as she continues the sucess of the organization.

We are proud to combine GAWL's impressive history with a clear vision for its future, which includes reaching out to women lawyers across the State of Georgia by means of 21st century technology. 

We include on this site information about the organization, its history, its leadership and extensive information about its upcoming events, such as the upcoming Trip to the U.S. Supreme Court.  GAWL also released its groundbreaking "It's About Time Study II" on March 3, which is now accessible online.  The results of the Study are gaining nationwide media attention, as we had hoped.

This new website looks better and should function more smoothly than any website we've had before. But this website is especially important to us because it gives us brand-new capabilities that were inconceivable even five or ten years ago, much less 80 years ago when GAWL was founded.  This new technology will allow us to accomplish one of our most important missions, one which - practically speaking - has been impossible up until now.

GAWL was founded for the express purpose of serving women lawyers across Georgia.  By sheer necessity, however, GAWL historically has focused its services on women in Atlanta, Columbus, and Savannah.  Most GAWL programs take place in Atlanta, and it simply isn't practicable for women from Polk County or Harrelson County to drive into Atlanta for the programs.  For that matter, many women in the metro areas have trouble taking time off to attend a program in midtown or downtown Atlanta.  The problem has been frustrating, because women outside the metro areas often are isolated from other women lawyers, and could use our services even more than the women in the metro areas.

Now, technology has provided the tool to solve this problem.  With the new functions on this website, we will be able to offer some of our most popular programs by podcast and streaming video.  Atlanta associates trying to keep up with the ever-increasing billable hours can listen to a program on their iPods, at their convenience.  Women in Statesboro or Perry can monitor programs right from their desks at work. We also will be hosting online discussion groups which will tackle some of the problems women lawyers face in practice, and we will be offering written articles and information through the online version of our monthly newsletter.

Within the next few weeks we will be putting up our Life in the Law series from Summer 2006 (Working Moms) and Summer 2007 (Business and the Law).  We expect to offer our first broadcast on March 20th, when we host a panel to discuss our new "It's About Time II" study, which examines the issue of how law firms can retain women who want to work a reduced schedules.  We will be broadcasting a series of interviews with women who began practice in Georgia more than 50 years ago, to talk to them about the changes and differences they see.

We appreciate your patience while we manage the transition to our new site. If you have any comments or suggestion, please submit them. We appreciate any feedback. 

In the meantime, join us!

Christian Torgrimson
President

Pursley, Lowery & Meeks, LLP