Deirdre Kelly for OCBA Secretary

Deirdre Kelly is a commercial and real estate litigator, the President of the Orange County Women Lawyers Association, and is currently a professor and externship director at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa.  She is an elected member of the OCBA Board of Directors.

Her passion for law has brought her from practice to teaching.

For more than 25 years, Deirdre has worked with many of the richly diverse aspects of the legal community. As a Loyola law student, Deirdre conducted 25-30 juvenile trials with the LA District Attorney’s office. She started at Jones Day after graduation, and was then brought in as Vice President and Legal Counsel of American Savings Bank in Irvine, where she resolved legacy issues from the S&L crisis. Afterward, Deirdre joined a vibrant trial group at Kindel & Anderson, and later practiced real estate litigation with Paul Hastings. Today, Deirdre teaches “Learning from Practice” for her externship students, and places externs in the private sector (law firms and legal departments) and the public sector (courts, government staffs, and non-profits).

She is committed to the Orange County Legal Community.

Deirdre is Chair of the OCBA’s Law School Task Force and Vice Chair of the Judiciary Committee. She is also an active member of the Diversity, Mommy Esq., and Pro Bono Committees. Deirdre is a member of the OCBA Charitable Fund Board, and serves on the Public Law Center’s Dinner Committee. Deirdre is active with the Coalition for Diversity in the Law, the Celtic Bar, ABTL, and the William Gray Legion Lex Inn of Court.

She is running for OCBA Secretary.

As OCBA Secretary, Deirdre will seek to bring together the many constituent parts of our Orange County legal community, from the bench, from the bar, and from academia, with a view to improving the strength of our communications and of our relationships, and ultimately the excellence of our practices and of our service to the community at large.  She would especially focus her efforts on making the OCBA more inclusive by reaching out to underserved groups of lawyers, both within and outside the OCBA, determining and responding to their needs, and by continuing to recruit and mentor law students and newly admitted attorneys, who are the future of our profession.