El Paso Deputy City Attorney Laura Prendergast Gordon has joined with a cousin to write “Wise Irish Women: A Journey of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship to Inspire the Irish Spirit.” The book compiles stories from women of Irish descent, including best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark and QVC host Jane Treacy. Chapters focus on the Irish love of family, Irish luck and Irish gumption, among other topics. “They’re very embracing and warm people, but they’ve also, if you look at them historically . . . had struggles,” Gordon says. “They’ve had economic challenges, and they persevere.” Lawyers can find advice in the book about balancing work and life — about not living to work but working to live, she says. “I think really that would probably be the big message, because as lawyers we have to work so hard, we spend so much time dealing with conflict that if you can find a way to do what you love, then it makes it a lot easier.” Writing the book started out as a way to remember and honor Gordon’s late father and her cousin Patricia Connorton Kagerer’s late mother — the two were brother and sister — and the authors’ grandmother, who emigrated from Ireland in the 1920s. It developed into a project focused on Irish women. “Our grandmother, their mother, was this amazing woman who lived to be 95 years old, who was positive and active,” says Gordon. “In fact, she lived alone until the week she died, and she was just an inspiration.” Gordon, a fifth-generation El Pasoan, earned her law degree from Texas Tech University School of Law after attending Bryn Mawr College. She has spent her career in government service, having started her second stint as a deputy city attorney in 2005. “Wise Irish Women” is published by The Small Press, a division of Brown Books Publishing Group in Dallas.
All Atwitter?
Carl Reynolds , administrative director of the Texas Office of Court Administration (OCA), says he has learned at professional conferences that some courts in other states use Twitter to release new opinions and other notices. Reynolds says no Texas appellate courts are yet in the Twitterverse, but the OCA has taken steps to prepare the Lone Star State’s judiciary to tweet if the time comes. First, Reynolds wants to protect the Texas judiciary’s brand. “We saw a Twitter feed that sounded confusingly like it was official,” he says, adding that his office notified Twitter that such an official handle was inappropriate. Casey Kennedy, OCA director of information services, writes in an email that the account posted Texas Supreme Court opinions as well as spam-like advertisements and weather reports. The OCA is working with Twitter to remove the unofficial profile. The OCA also has “reserved some Twitter names so that people would have them available,” Reynolds says. Kennedy writes that the OCA reserved the Twitter handles “SupremeCourt_TX, CCA_TX and 1stCOA_TX through 14thCOA_TX.” Reynolds notes that if a Texas appellate court judge or clerk decides to tweet, the OCA is there to help with “techie-side stuff.”
