April 2004

The Board's Work

by Lindsay Thompson

Seattle, February 27-28, 2004
After recent excursions afield, the BOG assembled at the WSBA HQ for this meeting.

There's always an executive session of an hour to an hour and a half. In it the BOG considers litigation or personnel matters, talks about legislative strategy, reviews the discipline caseload, and administers reprimands. Then they open the session and the president gives a summary about like the one I just gave you. After some memorably detailed reports in years past, the president, president-elect, and executive director now put a written report in the briefing book on their activities since the last meeting.

Then the BOG takes up the consent calendar, where things that are thought not to need any debate go. Members who differ can remove items for discussion; the rest get signed off on and take effect. It's an efficient if underutilized element of agenda management.

This meeting's batch of consent calendar items included Governor Mike Pontarolo's appointment of Laura Spradley of Spokane to the Committee of Law Examiners; the appointment of Linda Olson of Tacoma to a special, one-year term on the Character and Fitness Committee (a move intended to stagger the lay-member terms better); some committee policy revisions; removal of a nonparticipating member of the Civil Rights Committee; and approval of a change to CLE rules to give some credit for pro bono work.

The BOG then reappointed Richard Roberts of Seattle, and appointed Sarah Spierling Mack of Everett, to the Bench-Bar-Press Committee (if you find yourself wondering, from time to time, what do all these committees do?, a good place to get some quick answers is at www.wsba.org, which has the lowdown on all the Bar's many subordinate bodies.

President Savage and Director of Member and Community Relations Judy Berrett told the BOG about the results of the BOG's review committee's survey of member attitudes toward Bar News. Overall, it's quite good, and there's more information on the results in this issue.

Ellen Dial and WSBA lawyer Doug Ende gave a sneak preview of the sorts of changes to be brought to the BOG later this spring from the Ethics 2003 Committee, which Dial chairs. It has been looking at whether our rules of professional conduct need revising in light of the big 2000 rewrite of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

I wish I could have transcribed Dial's report. She knows her stuff and presented it with admirable clarity. When the full report comes out, we will give it big coverage in these pages, because it's important stuff.

Treasurer/Governor Bryce Dille presented the WSBA's 2002-2003 Auditor's Report. Clean bill of fiscal health. There was a suggestion that for the few really, really big checks WSBA writes there be two signatures, so the BOG voted to require two signatures for any check over $10,000. They approved the auditor's report, and voted not to allow the sale of member phone and fax numbers (in December 2003 the Board voted not to allow the sale of e-mail addresses except to CLE vendors). Dille's recommendations went so smoothly and unanimously that Governor Randy Gordon quipped, "I move we adopt the very next thing you say," to general laughter.

Next the BOG approved a contribution to help the Washington Defender Association update its standards for public-defense services, last updated in 1992. The standards are baselines for staffing and funding defense services, so it's a needed undertaking.

Finishing ahead of schedule, everyone removed to the Westin Hotel for a three-and-a-half-hour "listening session" with minority and specialty bar association leaders and members, on how to make the WSBA more relevant and useful to all WSBA members. There was a reception afterward, attended by luminaries of various sorts. Judge Richard Jones gave a keynote speech that included detailed ideas for lots of Bar News articles. We welcome advice from all quarters.

Overall, people seemed to think the exercise worthwhile. The proof of the pudding, of course, will be whether the BOG actually acts on the recommendations the conference generated. So far, historically, the BOG as an institution has tended to take on the comparatively easy issues while leaving the harder ones, well, out of sight, out of mind. One advantage for them this year, however, is that in the same week they met, the President of the United States called for an amendment of the federal constitution to reign in judicial activism. So this time, the hard questions will come to us all — governors, judges, citizens.

So that's my kinder, gentler report on the meeting. Some readers said in our survey that I need to remember the governors are volunteers, although one governor thought maybe I needed to punch up the report a bit because it looked like not many people were running for seats this year. So my new goal is wit without snarkiness, and moral uplift with the occasional admonition, because, like eating broccoli, it's good for us. I'm outta here.

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The Board's Work is an unofficial report on meetings and actions of the WSBA's elected governing body. Official minutes, containing matters not covered here, are kept by the WSBA executive director. WSBA members are welcome to attend and speak at all Board meetings.