Welcome to the website of the Rockland County Women’s Bar Association. We hope that this site will provide you useful information about our members, the benefits of membership with our organization, as well as information about the exciting itinerary of events that we have planned for the 2009-2010 year.

I am pleased to be serving my second year as President of the RCWBA. I am also thrilled that we will continue to offer a plethora of interesting events and programming to our members in the 2009-2010, starting with our book club in September. We expect to announce the title of the summer read soon, so please check your emails from us for this announcement!

To give you some highlights of our work over the 2008-2009 year, we walked with our sister chapter, the Women’s Bar Association of Orange and Sullivan Counties, in support of Breast Cancer research at Woodbury Commons. We once again collaborated with our neighboring chapter to hold our first “Lawyer Mom” event. Member moms and their kids got an opportunity to network and have fun making pizza and cupcakes at a local Young Chef’s Academy. It was a great chance for our members to attend a professional networking event while still including their families and we look forward to putting together another such event next year.

We also offered our members two Continuing Legal Education Programs. The first program was brought to us by Merrill Lynch in which we were educated on different retirement account options for the small business owner, a topic relevant to our members, many of whom own small law practices and many of whom represent small business owners. In November, Amy Baldwin Littman, Esq., our immediate past president and Bruce Muldoon, Esq., senior law clerk to the Honorable William K. Nelson, A.J.S.C. presented a seminar on legal writing, offering us views “from the bench and from the trench”. We will be offering two CLEs in the 2009-2010 year as well, one in October on Employment Law issues and one in March on Bankruptcy Law issues. Please check back for dates, times, locations and more specific information about these programs as the year progresses.

We hosted our annual holiday party and our annual Judicial Reception, in which we congratulated and welcomed the Honorable Thomas Walsh to the bench and celebrated the Honorable William P. Warren’s re-election to the Family Court.

The RCWBA was given “air time” on a local Rockland AM Radio Station when I was asked to be a guest speaker on a radio talk show entitled “The Law and You”. The topic was “Gender Equality: Are We There Yet?” We also co-sponsored the newly formed project, “ProBono NY”, in which local attorneys are asked to volunteer their services to help financially disadvantaged clients.

Lastly, we have continued to offer our members an opportunity to participate in our “book club”, having read last year “Girls Like Us” and “Oh Brother I’m Dying. Again, we are kicking off the 2009-2010 year with a book club event and we can’t wait to see you all there! Have a wonderful summer!

Rachel Tanguay-McGuane, President

• promote the advancement of the status of women in society and of women in the legal profession;
• promote the fair and equal administration of justice;
• and to act as a unified voice for its members with respect to issues of statewide, national and international significance to women generally and to women attorneys in particular.