Dear Members and Friends

We wish to thank you for your kind support during the 2019-2020 financial year.

It has been an incredibly difficult year for all of us.  The COVID-19 pandemic has led to harrowing impacts on our physical and mental health, jobs and livelihoods, not to mention the impact of racism and discrimination against our Asian-Australian communities. 

In these trying times, AALA will continue to provide support to Asian-Australian lawyers, law students, and supporters of AALA's vision of promoting cultural diversity in the law, whatever their background.  AALA recognises that it plays an important role in supporting our community in the current crisis.

We will now rely, more than ever, on your support and the support of our friends and colleagues in the broader legal profession and beyond to continue our work.  We will continue to provide the professional support, programs and representation that our members need in these trying times. 

We thank you for your responses to our inaugural AALA National Members’ Survey.  Your National Executive Committee is responding to this survey in rolling out AALA’s programs and initiatives for the new financial year.  We are focussing on providing more benefits to AALA members, improving the value and quality of our events (most of which are now being held online), and being more inclusive of all our members.  We have developed an AALA COVID-19 Policy to guide our work.

We are currently planning an inaugural AALA National Summit to be held entirely online later this year for our members. This exciting event will feature some of the most important issues and projects to advance cultural diversity objectives in the legal industry.  We are developing a terrific program of speakers and forums – please stay tuned.

In relation to the range of professional development benefits that we offer to members, in May we launched our inaugural AALA National Digital Events Series, comprising high-quality online CLEs and interactive forums.  We aim to provide sufficient annual CPD points to meet the requirements in most jurisdictions.  We also launched our flagship AALA Mentoring Program online and are planning an interactive Mentoring Workshop, the details of which will be announced soon.

As to furthering your career opportunities, we will shortly launch an online AALA Members’ Blackboard, which is an interactive portal that will build our member-to-member engagement, establish a forum for knowledge sharing and career opportunities and circulate industry news.  It will also provide a platform to support members’ wellbeing.

AALA is steadfastly committed to its overarching objective to promote cultural diversity in the law.  In these critical times, we aim to support you by protecting and safeguarding your interests, sharing opportunities, advancing your wellbeing, and effectively championing you to grow in difficult times and find your own pathway forward.  If you have any comments or feedback, please e-mail us at membership@aala.org.au – we would love to hear from you. 

Please take this moment to renew your AALA membership for the financial year 2020-2021 by logging in to your account and renewing your membership from our AALA home page.  Please note that if your membership fees are not paid, your membership may lapse and we won’t be able to provide our member benefits to you.

If you are a corporate member of AALA, your membership will apply for one year from the date of application for the corporate membership, which may not be the financial year. Please ensure that your membership is up to date. If you have any queries, please contact us at membership@aala.org.au.

Of course, if you are not yet a member of AALA, we warmly invite you to join!

Let’s share our unity on the AALA vision.

Kingsley Liu
National President
Asian Australian Lawyers Association
president@aala.org.au