February 2005

How to get inaugurated

by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor

It's the inaugural season. Having read, last month, how easy it can be to get elected to WSBA's Board of Governors, you're probably wondering, "How do I get to be president?"

That's easy. Any WSBA member can be president. So we start out with 28,000 potential candidates, give or take.

But there are footnotes.

First, subtract all the members who can't afford to take a chunk of a year to be president-elect, and most of the next year as top dog.

Next, you have to be in the part of the state The Rotation selects candidates from. To try to balance geographical and numerical issues in the bar (the East/West, North/South, and King County/Everywhere Else Things), the presidency rotates between eastern Washington, King County, western Washington outside King County, King County again, and then back to eastern Washington, and thence onward in the fullness of time.

Given the travel issues, if you're an out-of-state member, you're probably a non-starter, although a year or two ago, an out-of-state member applied for appointment to a BOG at-large seat, and more ought to try, just to crack the idea it won't work.1

To make it easier for someone who hasn't served on the BOG — or who has but has been off the BOG for a while — to be president, the Board created a president-elect position some years ago.2 For a long time, the tradition was that governors served their three years, then went back to the day job, and returned as candidates for president when it fit their career plans. Sometimes this was up to a decade later. A get-up-to-speed year seemed a practical solution.

So far, however, it hasn't worked. The only time WSBA has had a president who wasn't a BOG member first was in 1975. This cuts the pool fairly dramatically, to former members of the Board in the area where The Rotation lands each year.

Since the 1990s the Board's work has increased and changed. Previously the Bar year revolved around whatever theme the incoming president wanted to stress, and the annual state bar convention. The BOG ended the bar convention3 after years of losses and declining attendance, and moved to a long-range planning model that means most of the Bar's work is multi-year in nature. The perception that presidents need to hit the ground running seems to have shortened the time between when governors left the Board and ran for president. That reduced the pool of realistic candidates to former governors who served within the memory of the sitting BOG.

In 1998, the Board stumbled into what I call The Fast Track Model. They elected a first-year governor as president-elect. He spent what would have been his second year on the BOG as president-elect, and his third as president.

A light bulb went off in many heads. Why spend five, six, or more years getting to the top when you can do it in three? Sitting governors started declaring for president their first year on the Board. Since 1999, one president-elect served a full term on the Board before moving up, and that one had no opposition. Twice, two sitting governors ran against each other. Two candidates in recent years who'd been out of BOG circles for some years were effectively DOA. They'd been away too long.

Opinions go both ways about the merits of The Fast Track, but there's no doubt it makes the Board of Governors less democratic. Each time an elected governor resigns to move up, an appointed governor takes the seat.4 It's a fair comment to say we have a system that says it works one way but in practice works another way, and that reduces the pool of presidential candidates to a handful of members every year.

The Fast Track is good for the people who benefit from it, but does it serve WSBA members well?

That's a question a committee chaired by lawyer Jim Macpherson is considering. They are looking at how governors and presidents are selected. What do you think? Send in your ideas and we'll not only pass them along, but also publish them.

_____________________

Lindsay Thompson thought about running for WSBA president in 2001 but lay down until the feeling passed. E-mail your election reform ideas to him at tradelaw@thompson-law.com.
 
NOTES

1  Into the late 1980s, for example, the Received Wisdom was you couldn't edit Bar News effectively if you didn't live in Seattle.

2  The president-elect gets chosen every June to succeed the president-elect, who will become president in September, succeeding the sitting president. I call this the "heir and a spare" solution.

3  . . . But not the annual meeting, which isn't the same thing, although it was part of the bar convention program except when the convention was out of state. The bar convention was a tradeshow-CLE-section-meeting-theme party and famous speakers fest that ran several days. One year, the planners crammed Bernard Kalb, then of CBS, and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade, onto the same luncheon billing, with infelicitous results. Poulsbo lawyer Jeff Tolman famously remarked, "Mrs. Kalb had two sons, and we hired the wrong one."

4  One may well argue that since the BOG now has two appointed at-large seats and one appointed Young Lawyers Division seat, it has segued into a mixed board of elected and appointed members, making the argument above moot.

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