Chair’s Message

by Ryan Baron

Ryan Baron is Of Counsel at Best, Best & Krieger’s Irvine office and the Chair of the Public Law Section Executive Committee.

The California Lawyer’s Association (CLA) is in its first year of transition implementation and matters are going extremely well. The CLA board is holding a robust recruitment for an executive director who will see the transition forward as the second largest bar association in the nation. CLA members attended a town hall on June 18, 2018, providing direction to the board on the desired qualifications for the director. The board has been working with all 16 educational sections on revising individual section bylaws that will comply with CLA bylaws as well as implement procedures to ensure meaningful participation by section members. And, I have been working with the Location Development Committee to locate the next headquarters. With our committee’s assistance, the board voted to relocate CLA from San Francisco to Sacramento to save costs on rent and labor and be closer to the state capitol and the judiciary to ensure CLA member interests are fully represented.

The Public Law Section Executive Committee has also been active through the first half of 2018, having met three times this year in coordinating section members educational activities. On April 27, 2018, our Section’s annual Open Meetings and Public Records Act conference was held at UCLA School of Law. The conference was attended by over 100 registrants with a diverse program that included PRA updates, discovery and PRA request Q&A, best practices in records retention, and a program on cost controls.