Wheaton attorney Irene F. Bahr, who was installed June 16 as the 130th president of the Illinois State Bar Association, is the first woman from a county outside of Cook to lead the largest organization of practicing attorneys in the state.

A member of the ISBA Board of Governors since 1997, Bahr was elected third vice president in 2003, when she defeated Jack C. Carey of Belleville. She had lost two years earlier to Ole Bly Pace III of Sterling.

A 1977 cum laude graduate of the DePaul University College of Law, clerking for the Illinois attorney general while studying law, Bahr began her professional career as an attorney for the Illinois Liquor Control Commission.

After 10 years, she left the commission as chief counsel and parlayed the experience into a solo practice niche in liquor licensing, regulation and related litigation at the circuit and appellate levels.

In 1990, Bahr embarked on a bar leadership voyage by commencing a two-year stint as the eighth president of the DuPage Association of Women Lawyers. Her tenure, and the years that immediately followed, were marked by steady increases in both membership and recognition of the association.

In 1992, she was elected to the 18th Circuit seat on the ISBA Assembly that had been held by her husband, Judge Robert J. Anderson. In 1994, she was appointed chair of the Assembly Finance Committee.

Bahr's involvement in DAWL continued as a force behind creation of the Child Friendly Courts Foundation and establishment of “Safe Harbor,” its supervised waiting room in the 18th Circuit Judicial Center for children of witnesses and litigants.

The foundation's 11th annual annual Zoo Ball, a benefit for Safe Harbor, is scheduled Friday, Nov. 17, at the Brookfield Zoo.

Bahr was president of the foundation in 1997, and she continues to serve as vice president. Among her initiatives as ISBA president will be encouraging the bench and bar of county courts around the state to accommodate children's waiting rooms.

She has appointed Angela Imbierowicz, also a DAWL past president, to head a task force that will develop a manual on organizing, staffing and maintaining courthouse waiting rooms.

Bahr received the inaugural Inspirational Woman Award on June 1 from her colleagues of the DAWL, as it entered its 25th year. The honor complements her Distinguished Leadership and Meritorious Service Award, earned in 1993, and the Glass Ceiling Buster Award in 1997.

Acknowledging the Inspirational Woman Award, Bahr credited her father, a Chicago firefighter, and her mother, an Irish immigrant, among her own inspirations, which included five sisters and three brothers.

Some of them joined her husband and three children in the task of stuffing and mailing campaign materials leading to her election in 2003.

Bahr is a Silver Fellow of the Illinois Bar Foundation and a board member of the ISBA Mutual Insurance Co. She was ISBA treasurer in 2000-01 and secretary in 2001-02. The DuPage County YWCA honored her in 1998 as an Outstanding Woman Leader.