A year of progress and achievement
By Sheldon Sloan
President, State Bar of California
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Sloan |
Later this month, with mixed emotions of sadness and joy, I will turn over
the Presidency of the State Bar to my good friend Jeff Bleich, who has served
this Board with distinction and will be an outstanding leader for the next
year.
As I prepare to move on — after serving on the board for four years
with some of the most talented members of our profession and with several dedicated
public appointees — I can reflect back upon this past year as President
and say that we held true to our commitment to improve the Bar and the profession
without reinventing the wheel and spending tremendous amounts of money to create
new programs.
First and foremost, we carried through on commitments made by former Presidents
to implement what has become known as our “Pipeline Program” to
attract younger people of all levels to our profession. We extended our hand
to bar associations around the state and uploaded on our Web site extensive
resource material so that our Pipeline efforts could be implemented in every
community. We have recorded downloads from bar associations all over the nation — just
as it was predicted we would.
We made better use of our resources and talent by taking five separate access
committees and creating one central Council on Access and Fairness, thus enabling
more focused and cooperative efforts to provide opportunities for people of
all backgrounds. We made use of our existing resources — most notably
our publication Kids & the Law — to help interest young people
in the laws that affect them and perhaps even encourage them some day to consider
law as a career.
Our second pledge for this year was to implement a new set of civility guidelines
to stem a perceived rise in unbecoming behavior by attorneys in and out of
court.
The guidelines passed by the board this past summer are designed to complement
those already put in place by local bars throughout the state. In fact, instead
of starting from scratch, we built on many of these guidelines already in place
and focused on eight aspects of professionalism: civility, professional integrity,
personal dignity, candor, diligence, respect, courtesy and cooperation. We
now extend our hand to every member of the State Bar to sign on voluntarily
to this effort to help bring civil behavior back to our daily work as lawyers.
It is my fond hope that next year, under Jeff’s wise and steady hand,
the Civility Pledge, together with the previously developed Diversity Pledge
and Pro Bono Pledge, will be implemented across the state.
We also took two major steps this year to improve our income flow and strengthen
bar services. With the former, this Board voted to adhere to its February 1
statutory deadline for dues payments. As a result, we collected nearly 90 percent
of our dues payments by the deadline and we sent the smallest number of non-payers
to the Supreme Court for suspension in modern Bar history. Incidentally, by
adhering to the deadline and reducing the number of fee mailings, we saved
at least $65,000 in postage and fee statement production. We project even more
savings in this area in the future as more of our members move to the Web to
manage their State Bar membership. In this regard, let me once more urge every
member to log on and update your personal profiles, as it is the lack of such
updating that causes the vast majority of suspensions. We just can’t
find people who move and don’t remember to notify us.
With the latter, we are taking a giant step to adequately fund our technological
advancement by including in the next three fee cycles a $10 assessment dedicated
to upgrading and securing the technological infrastructure of the bar. This
does not mean that lawyers will be paying more in dues. The $10 that members
formerly paid into our building fund will no longer be collected now that the
Bar has paid off its San Francisco headquarters building.
As a technological aside, your Board moved seamlessly to a paperless agenda
this past year, and is now working to advance an initiative to require members
to register and create a My State Bar Profile. This will be a major step toward
the ultimate goal of a paperless State Bar membership.
Also for our members, in August, in cooperation with the Los Angeles County
Superior Courts, we launched a pilot program to test a photo identification
card to provide Los Angeles lawyers expedited access through the employee security
line to LA courtrooms. We offered the invitation to participate in this program
to 26,000 attorneys who maintain a private e-mail address on their My State
Bar Profile. The 1,500 slots in the pilot program were filled in less than
48 hours, demonstrating that this is the type of service that our members want
the State Bar to provide.
The Bar and the Los Angeles Superior Court will be working together in the
next year to assess the pilot program and consider expanding it, making it
permanent and, with the cooperation of the AOC, extending it to other areas
of California where the need exists. This program is designed to help the Courts
run on time, without delays caused by lawyers caught in long security lines.
We set out a year ago to keep the Bar on track, keep our eye on spending and
intercede where we can to help make our members’ lives better. I am proud
of what we accomplished and recognize fully that none of this would have happened
without the ideas, cooperation and support of the Board of Governors, our staff,
led by Judy Johnson, and hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers.
I especially want to recognize and thank the other members of the Board of
Governors who leave this year with me; Marguerite Downing — who not only
is leaving the board, but the practice of law as well, as she has been appointed
to the Los Angeles Superior Court — for her strong leadership in the
Civility Initiative and on branding issues; Ruthe Ashley — for her continuing
leadership on the Pipeline and the Diversity Council; Jo-Ann Grace — for
her solid leadership in Volunteer Involvement and Quality Appointment Recommendations;
and Jim Scharf — for his leadership in Regulation, Admissions and Discipline.
All are true leaders, and the members of the State Bar of California have been
fortunate, indeed, to have them serve the past three years.
Finally, I depart with a major thanks to all other Governors and staff for
this opportunity and for their hard work. I now offer my support to your new
President, Jeff Bleich, and a new Board of Governors, which will continue to
move us even further into the future.
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