June 2003
The Board's Work
by Lindsay Thompson and Robert "Ace" Welden, Bar News Cub Reporter
Bellevue, April 11-12, 2003
[Lindsay Thompson]
Friday, April 11: After a meeting in January and two in February, it was nice to go a month and a half without gathering with the Board of Governors, nice to have the meeting close to home (to be able to sleep in my own bed), and nicest of all to be able to blow off Day 2 for a long-planned holiday in Palm Springs.
Meetings begin with reports. The president makes one and then the president-elect makes one. With tort reform mutating daily in the Legislature, both Dick Manning and Dave Savage had a lot to report. Manning estimated he'd put in 150 hours on WSBA business since the BOG last rose.
Then the president called for board members who'd attended the Western States Bar Conference to report that they enjoyed the experience. (Well, he didn't actually say that, but I'm the only governor I ever heard who thought most of the event was pointless and boring, so you can pretty much predict the governors' reports will be that they enjoyed it. Each year the president, president-elect, executive director and one class of govs attend the event. It is held in places like Arizona and Hawaii.)
In a nutshell, the conference is like a national gathering of fraternity chapters. Bar prezzes and governors meet other prezzes and governors, and marvel over how alike or different the problems they deal with are. There are panels made up of prezzes and govs and ex-prezzes and ABA leaders, some academics, and reps of groups, like Martindale-Hubbell, that sponsor the event. There is an interminable roll call of states, during which prezzes go on, some more succinctly than others, about what their associations are working on.
The conference elects leaders as well, mainly execs from various states, and they, too, bloviate on topics of interest. There are actually bits that are capable of interest, and the agenda ends early enough that plenty of golf and tennis and shopping can be had. I attended the conference in my last year on the BOG in 2001. We were trapped in a resort hotel on the Big Island — $25 dollars for the cab from anywhere — surrounded by miles of lava beds, across which thousands of high-school kids have arranged white coral to read for eternity "Egbert and Hilda" against the black lava rock. There are all the usual, dreadful tourist events inflicted by Hawaiian resort hotels. But the weather was nice, some of the seminars were reasonably useful, and I got to have dinner twice at Merriman's in Kamuela, one of the best restaurants in the known universe. "Good beat, easy-to-understand lyrics . . . I give it a 72, Denny.")
After the annual appraisal of the western states, Executive Director Jan Michels updated the board on the work of replacing the software that runs the WSBA computers and keeps up with more than 27,000 members' dues, CLEs, discipline and everything else. It's complicated, but seems to be going well.
The board approved the members, and charter of a blue-ribbon committee to study and report back on fixing problems in the state system of indigent criminal defense. Co-chairs are attorney Marc Bowman and Supreme Court Justice Robert Utter (ret.).
The board lunched with members of the East King County Bar Association.
The biggest chunks of the day went to deciding what to do about vexing issues of judicial recommendations, hearing the annual report of the Young Lawyers Division, and electing a new governor to represent the YLD for the next three years.
The judicial recommendations problem is that sometimes with the best of intention the committee that rates people for judicial appointments to superior and appellate courts gets the ratings, well, wrong. So who to oversee their work?
A board committee chaired by Ron Ward produced a report, and Carl Carlson produced a minority report. Basically the question was this: If there is a review panel set up to which lawyers unhappy with their ratings can appeal, should that panel be able to upgrade the offending rating? Carlson didn't think the review body should be able to change ratings; the ratings should be remanded back to the committee that did the legwork in the first place.
The board approved motions by Carlson to delete the upgrade provision, and one by Jon Ostlund to improve the record the committee makes of its decisions and the basis for them, then approved the overall package from Ward's committee.
Young Lawyers President Lance Hester and a cadre of YLD leaders gave the board the division's yearly report on their work. YLD has irons in all kinds of public-service fires. Even your obed't srvt, who has sat through such reports back to the youth of John McKay, found it most impressive. Now if some more of them will just run for seats on the board of governors . . . .
But I digress. Paul Lehto, whose election as the first YLD governor did not, after all, herald The End of Life as We Knew It in 2001, comes to the end of an interesting and effective tenure in September. YLD sent three names to the board from which to make a choice. Each was interesting — Eric Martin, Noah Davis and Kathleen O'Sullivan — each in his and her own way. After interviews and deliberations, the board gave the nod to O'Sullivan, who practices with Perkins Coie in Seattle ("big firms deserve representation, too," one member quipped).
At day's end the WSBA disciplinary department leadership and defense lawyer Kurt Bulmer updated the board on the long-ongoing effort to eliminate the backlog in lawyer-discipline complaints so they are handled promptly and effectively in the future. The process was likened to a pig mid-python, as drawing down the backlog of complaints has led to a consequent backlog of cases to go to hearing. The prediction is that pretty soon the python will be all caught up and so will the discipline docket. Well done, said everyone to the department staff and lawyers, for a hard job well carried forward.
The board rose at 6 p.m. I turned over the pen to Bob Welden, who has donned his cub reporter hat on other occasions in the past when I had to be elsewhere. In this instance I left on vacation for a lounge chair and drinks with little umbrellas next to a pool in Palm Springs, and returned rested and sunburned.
[Bob ("Ace") Welden]
Saturday, April 12: The Saturday board meeting began with a presentation from the board members to Barrie Althoff, former WSBA chief disciplinary counsel and professionalism counsel. The board thanked Barrie for his eight years of service to the WSBA, and congratulated him on his new position as executive director of the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Barrie thanked the board, and spoke of the importance of member outreach and education on legal ethics.
Gail Stone, WSBA lobbyist, reported on legislation of interest to the WSBA with three weeks remaining in the regular session, including corporate act and trademark revisions sponsored by the WSBA and passed by the Legislature. A proposed bill to abolish the Growth Management Hearings Board and transfer jurisdiction to superior court prompted the board to unanimously pass a resolution expressing board concern about the impact on court budgets unless funding is provided by the Legislature to cover this shift in jurisdiction. Other issues, including the filing-fee bill, and tort-law changes, were still fluid, and, by the time this report is printed, should have been resolved.
The board then returned to the proposals regarding the Judicial Recommendations Committee. A revised version of the recommendations from Friday was discussed, and after numerous motions, seconds, friendly amendments and withdrawn motions, the question was called on the main motion and the board unanimously approved revised guidelines for the JRC.
In other business, the board asked Governor Ken Davidson to draft a resolution for board consideration calling on the Washington congressional delegation to support legislation to create an exception to the Controlled Substances Act for doctors and patients prescribing and using marijuana in accordance with state laws. The board also voted unanimously to co-sponsor a recommendation to the ABA House of Delegates from the Task Force on the Model Definition of the Practice of Law recommending that every jurisdiction adopt a definition of the practice of law and setting out principles and recommendations for doing so.
"The Board's Work" is an unofficial report on meetings and actions of WSBA's elected governing body. Official minutes, containing matters not covered here, are kept by the WSBA executive director. WSBA members are welcomed to attend and speak at all board meetings.
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