President’s message

Christy Coats, PLS

Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too!

How can you have your cake and eat it, too? How do you balance your home life, your job, and still find time to develop friendship and still have time for a social life? I have found that being a member of SALSA has helped me in a number of ways in this regard. Yes, I have sacrificed some lunch hours and a few evenings, but my membership has helped me not only to improve my job skills by providing high quality Continuing Legal Education, but has also given me the opportunity to participate in community service, to network with other legal professionals, and to develop friendships with individuals I would probably otherwise never have met. Being a member of SALSA, and therefore also a member of TALP and NALS, has provided many exciting opportunities.

Over the past couple of years, I have learned just how difficult, yet how rewarding, it is to raise money for SALSA in order to present scholarships to individuals attending school who intend to go into the legal field. I have seen how much the members of SALSA care about their community through their hard work in the various community service ventures that have been undertaken, including the Bowl for Kids Sake events and the solicitation of donations for the Humane Society.

In October of 2008, I was able to travel to Norfolk, Virginia for the NALS Annual Education Conference and National Forum. Not being one who is terribly comfortable with rooms full of strangers, I was extremely anxious about traveling so far out of my comfort zone. My roommate, whom I had never met before, was from Nevada. Luckily for me, she had attended NALS conferences before and took me under her wing for the weekend, scooting me along to where I needed to be when I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. While there, we explored the area and took in the sights, which included the awesome Mermaids on Parade, an exhibit similar to San Antonio’s Cows on Parade, the Battleship Wisconsin, and the historic homes nearby.

Also while in Norfolk, the girls from Texas who were in attendance, whom I had also never met before, introduced themselves and made me feel welcome right away. On our last evening there, they invited me to have dinner at a restaurant called Freemason Abbey, which was located in a renovated church that had been built over a century ago. Should you ever go to Norfolk, you really need to eat here; it makes you feel like you are a small part of the rich history of Virginia.

Over time, the faces that were so unfamiliar to me in Norfolk have become more familiar as I have since seen them in Waco, Austin, here in San Antonio last year, and in Oklahoma in March of this year. When I attended the NALS Professional Development and Education Conference in Tulsa, many of the faces were familiar enough that I felt much more comfortable than I had during my trip to Norfolk a little over a year earlier. I can tell you also that the professional development curriculum, while a bit overwhelming, went a really long way in preparing me for the role of president this year. I still have not finished going back over all of the information that was presented to us at the conference, but should I ever find the time to do so, we have a lot of new ideas to implement!

I encourage each of you to try something new as part of SALSA, TALP, and NALS this year. Not ready to be a committee chair? Join a committee and become familiar with how they work. Ready to chair a committee but not sure how to go about it? Contact any of the officers and we will be happy to help you get started and to guide you throughout the year. Join us, and have your cake (your job, your life), and eat it, too (learn new skills, meet new people, help your community, and travel to new places)!