By Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Though the presidency of the Jacksonville Bar Association changes hands each year, one person has been behind the scenes for more than a decade carefully guiding each new leader.
For the past 13 years, Diane Gill has been the executive director of the JBA and a guiding light for each new president. This week she will assume her own leadership position among fellow bar association directors in Florida.
Gill is being inaugurated as the president of the Florida Council of Bar Executives at the Florida Bar’s annual meeting in Orlando Friday at 10 a.m.
Though this is Gill’s first time leading the Florida Council of Bar Executives, she has been an active member in the organization for several years.
As president, Gill will conduct the organization’s three meetings next year and will be in charge of directing one educational program at the Florida Bar Leaders Workshop. Though the position requires a little more of her time, Gill said it will not interfere with her work at the Jacksonville Bar Association.
“This really is a moment of pride for me,” she said.
While Gill is very involved with her work at the JBA and the Florida Council of Bar Executives, she is also quite active in several other professional organizations including the American Bar Association, the American Society of Association Executives, the National Association of Bar Executives and the Florida Society of Association Executives.
She has been vice-chair of the Florida Bar’s lawyer referral service committee for two years. Gill has also chaired three different committees for the National Association of Bar Executives and is currently chairing a committee for the Florida Society of Association Leaders.
Gill also does a lot of volunteer work with various organizations around Jacksonville. She used to be on the executive committee of the Cancer Society and is a very active member of the Rotary Club of West Jacksonville.
All of those accolades might seem like a lot of time commitment to some but Gill said she is only able to do it all “through a great deal of support from the leadership of the bar and my family.”
Gill and husband Larry have been living in Jacksonville for the past 27 years, though they moved to Macon, Ga. for about one and a half years when she took the executive director position of United Cerebral Palsy, a national advocacy organization that is a major source of information on cerebral palsy.
Though she is proud to be the next president of the Florida Council of Bar Executives, Gill said she has little ambition to seek office with one of the national leadership associations with which she is affiliated. She said that kind of commitment would take too much time away from her position at the JBA.
“They meet a lot more often and I just don’t have that kind of time,” she said. “It is very difficult to be in that position of leadership and remain as an effective executive director of a local bar association.
“The Jacksonville bar is a very active bar and we do a great number of public service projects as well as a number of services for our members. I wouldn’t want to take away from that.”