California Lawyers Association

Meet Your CLA Staff: Kevin Marsden

image of Kevin Marsden
Kevin Marsden

CLA is welcoming a slate of new staff members in 2019 to help fulfill its mission of promoting excellence, diversity and inclusion in the legal profession and fairness in the administration of justice and the rule of law. Get to know Web Development Manager Kevin Marsden, who joined in January.

What key experience do you bring to CLA?

I have about 10 years of experience building websites with the WordPress platform. For the past few years, I worked for Automattic, the company behind WordPress. I kind of see myself as an IT Jack of all trades. Folks rely on me when things come up. If they have trouble using Excel or if there’s a problem with the projector in the conference room. I find it’s nice because every day is different, with new challenges and issues to solve.

Tell me more about your last job at Automattic?

WordPress is free, open source software that anyone can use and modify in any way they’d like. The founder of WordPress founded Automattic, which provides hosting for WordPress sites. I helped people create websites and ran a support team.

Why did you want to come to work for CLA?

There were a number of draws for me. One, I found out it was a relatively small staff size and relatively new. There’s so much potential to have a large impact with a smaller and new organization. The second was reading the job description. There was a wide range of job responsibilities, a wide variety of projects to be involved in and tasks on a day-to-day basis.

Did you already live in Sacramento?

We’ve been in the Sacramento area for five years. I had been working at home. It’s really nice to be back in an office but to also have the flexibility to work at home one day a week give or take. Now it’s the best of both worlds.

What projects are you excited about currently?

The big one is our website, which launched last month, in March. We’re really excited about that. We see this as really the beginning because we have plans to make improvements and make it a useful tool for the organization.

Can you say more about the website improvements that will impact members?

Based on feedback we got after the launch, we’re adding a dedicated events page for each section and enabling a feature where we can highlight featured events for each section. If they have a big in-person conference we can highlight that on their home page.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

The big thing is spending time with my wife and three young sons. They’re 8, 7 and 4. Youth sports keep us pretty busy. We try to get outside and into the mountains as much as we can for running, backpacking, hiking. It’s so nice being close to Tahoe. We’re in Folsom, which is 20-25 east of Sacramento. We’re already that much closer to the mountains.

What message would you like to share with CLA members?

It’s an exciting time for the CLA. The group of staff we have in place is really a great group of smart and motivated folks. With this group in place, we have the potential to help the CLA become a world-class organization.

Finish this sentence: CLA members should reach out to you for…?

Any questions on the website, any feedback on the website. Those are the big things. Anything related to the website, feature requests or content changes, I’m happy to help out.


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