February 2003

Redux All Over Again

by Lindsay T. Thompson, Bar News Editor

— Wallace Stevens, "Debris of Life and Mind," The Collected Poems (1982)

Fifteen years ago this month I attended my first Board of Governors meeting as editor of Bar News. The betting was that I wouldn't last long. The board was going through its 15-year Bar News itch and nearly made the editor a staff position the summer before. I inherited a board committee sent to figure out what to do about the magazine. Fifteen years earlier, displeased with another editor, the board fired him and actually took the job in-house for a while. Eventually they went back to having a practicing lawyer edit the magazine.

When I laid down the pen in 1995, I'd lasted eight years and Bar News was nationally recognized as one of the best state bar magazines. It looked a bit ramshackle — we had no money for art or color — but the content was strong, and members vigorously debated issues in the letters section.

2003: Another 15 years, another BOG committee looking at the magazine, once again considering whether the now 68-year practice of an independent editor ought to be ended.

Last fall, Editor Mark Panitch had to resign — before the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) could seek and select a replacement. Someone was needed who could step in for a while and already knew the drill. With the possibility of the editorship being taken in-house pending, there may or may not be a vacancy at all. So I'm back for a while, at the EAB's request. Call me "Your Interimcy."

Much has changed since the last time I became editor. In 1988 I was 32, recently admitted to practice, and working for a Vancouver firm. I wrote my application letter on a typewriter. The magazine was laid out by sticking waxed strips of copy onto big boards. There was no e-mail. Faxes were just coming into use.

Now I'm 47 and have been a lawyer nearly 20 years. I do almost all the editing and communication with authors by e-mail. The layout is done on computer, handed off to the printer on disk, and printed direct to plate — no large sheets of film any more.

I've changed, too. As editor I met lawyers all over the state and they are friends to this day. I know the difference between practice in Republic, Port Angeles, Walla Walla, Yakima and Cathlamet. I've been a small-town lawyer, a government lawyer, and a big-city boutique-firm lawyer. Now I run my own firm, and sweat the challenges of cash flow and marketing, and the occasional dot-com crash. Having lost a parent to death and having nearly cashed my own chips in a bicycle accident, I have intimations of mortality I didn't a third of my life ago. I've served a term on the Board of Governors and seen how running the association looks from there.

But there are also constants in the life of the Bar and Bar News: our commitment to self-regulation, with its consequent obligation to serve the public that grants us that right; defense of the judiciary in a time of increasingly partisan campaigns and attacks from the media and legislative bodies. Bar News stands for helping members be better lawyers — to be more than the least we can be, better than just dispensing justice to those of whom we approve, pitching in rather than using the inadvertent pro bono we all do as an excuse for indifference to the needs of those who can't afford us. We must look at improving the profession as President Kennedy did going to the moon: "We do this, not because it is easy," he declared, "but because it is hard."

Another thing that won't change is how I report on association governance: as I see it, without fear or favor.

I don't know how long this gig will last, but I intend to make the most of it, and make Bar News the best I can. Let us walk together for a while and visit in the pages of our magazine. As one of my literary mentors, North Carolina journalist, editor and poet laureate Sam Ragan, wrote: "The journey goes on/And sometimes days/Are more important than years."

It's good to be back.

Lindsay Thompson is a shareholder of Thompson Gipe PC, in Seattle (http://www.thompson-law.com/). He was Bar News editor in 1988-95, and a member of the WSBA Board of Governors in 1998-2001.