designed to highlight women who are taking a leading role in senior business circles that are shaping the community.

*** When Mrs. Dianna Kempe became managing partner of one of the Island's largest law firms in 1990, she felt that, because she was a woman, there was still an artificial burden of proof that lay before her.

She hardly has to prove herself professionally to anyone. At 45, she is at the top of her trade. Few local lawyers can lay claim to what she has accomplished.

Her fourth anniversary as managing partner of Appleby, Spurling & Kempe is next month. The day The Royal Gazette had a rare opportunity to pull Mrs.

Kempe closer to the Press limelight she has always shunned, was exactly 24 years and a day, after she was called to the Bar of England and Wales.

Even then, though, she had to wait months to prove herself. She had obtained a Degree of Utter Barrister at Middle Temple and Inns of Court School of Law, London, England at the tender age of 20, and had to wait until she was 21 before legally allowed to be called to the bar.

As the second most senior partner at AS&K, she does not see her firm in competition with other law firms here. Her focus is more jurisdictional.

"We're competing as a country with every other single offshore country in the world, and it behoves every single one of us to provide absolutely outstanding services.

"Offshore jurisdictions are flavours of the month and we have to keep Bermuda as the flavour of the month. Look at Hong Kong, for them Bermuda has been significantly the flavour of the month.

"Making sure that you give the instant gratification, which is sort of the Eastern way of looking at service providers, is a real challenge for us. They expect something tomorrow and they are not interested in hearing any excuses about it. They just want it.

"That is quite a demand to satisfy, yet Bermuda has been able to meet that challenge. One of the things that is quite excellent about Bermuda is that all the professional service providers have managed to meet the standard to compete worldwide.

"There are a lot of law firms, for example, that are just as good as AS&K and they are doing better every day. That is important, that there is variety and that is the only way we will continue to be successful.'' Mrs. Kempe said Bermuda woke up to the fact that it could no longer continue business as usual, business in a low-key way. The enlargement of the role of the Bermuda International Business Association (BIBA), in selling Bermuda was vital, and a strategic move. She is vice president.

She wouldn't say that she has hit "any major glass ceilings'' on her way to the top. But then when she pauses to reflect upon it all, she notes that unlike her experience, men who she has watched become CEOs are automatically accepted. It is a fait accompli.

She said it was a contrast to when she took on her senior managerial role with AS&K. Although people still respected her as an attorney, she felt that not all of the principly male senior management fraternity in Bermuda nodded approvingly at her top job.

"I think I had to go through quite a significant period of time to be measured as to whether I was found to be acceptable. It was without a doubt.

I've not seen that happen with men.'' Kempe has high praise for black women "It was like having to go through the exercise of `getting there' again. To the extent that that's just my perception. I don't think that you can honestly say that as a woman, you've got to work harder, because it is a function of how you feel how hard you are already working.

"I think Bermuda is slightly better for upward mobility for women, than other places. The black Bermudian woman is the one who works in this community. She is the one who is prepared to be responsible and accountable.

"She is the one who is prepared to ensure that she has sufficient funds to look after her dependents, and with that comes an ability to move up as far as she can go.

"Generally speaking, those women in Bermuda who have the desire and the ability are succeeding. It's not something that people are really complaining about here, at least not as much as in North America.'' Bermuda's business growth opportunities in international business, said the BIBA vice president, was the reason she became involved in the International Bar Association (IBA).

"We have to be aggressive. We have to market ourselves to death. We have to be out there and be seen.'' Mrs. Kempe has been an IBA council member since 1990 and spent two years until 1992 on the missions and goals committee. She remains a member of the general professional programme committee and has chaired their membership committee.

Today she is the IBA secretary-general, which links and represents a considerable number of worldwide bar associations together, the largest organisation in the world specifically for lawyers who are international practitioners. It has 17,000 members.

Her career began as a general litigation attorney for the first two years with a varied brief until specialising in planning matters.

Mrs. Kempe was enrolled as a barrister and attorney in Bermuda in 1973, became a Bermudian in 1974, and became an AS&K partner in 1979. She has headed the firm's liquidations/insolvency department specialising in all types of liquidation for the past 13 years.

She was the first woman to sit on the bench in Magistrates' Court, as an acting magistrate for six months in 1975. She was vice president of the Bermuda Bar Council from 1985 and president from 1987 to 1990.

Through Government appointment, she assisted in the drafting of the winding up legislation, promulgated here in 1977. The planning minister appointed her to a committee to re-draft the City of Hamilton Development Plan in 1984.

She has been an expert witness in a number of cases in US courts, particularly in connection with Bermuda's insolvency laws, and has been governor and an executive member of the Bermuda Employers' Council since 1990, where she is currently vice president.

Mrs. Kempe was the first woman Queen's Counsel as of April 1992. She is aware of the trend toward `lawyer-bashing' and believes that some `bad apples' in the profession have caused that to happen. She points to the American advertisements that tell people that if they have suffered personal injury, contact their office.

"I think we bring it on ourselves, sometimes. But there are going to be times when people get a negative view of attorneys through their personal dealings.

When litigators are cross-examining people, they are not going to be `Mr. Nice Guy'. But many people won't look at the situation and feel that the lawyer is only doing his job.'' She said that small jurisdictions make it even more difficult. And small jurisdictions, amongst lawyers, breeds more familiarity and more arguments.

"Being able to do your job well and not have rows with people is the secret to success in this Country. Those rows are going to happen in such a small place, though.'' Mrs. Kempe, known as one of the leading lawyers in terms of lucrative local liquidations, started the first liquidations department in a local law firm in Bermuda. There are attorneys at AS&K now, who do nothing but liquidations.

Her husband, Mr. Charles Kempe, chairman of chartered accountants, Kempe & Whittle, is one of the top liquidators here.

Mrs. Dianna Kempe