On the snagging of appointments

by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor

Let’s talk about committees.

Committees come in two flavors. There are WSBA’s standing committees, and there are all sorts of other bodies to which WSBA has the right to nominate or appoint members.

The standing committee appointments are done annually. You can serve up to three years on a committee before rotating off, and if you are in line to chair your committee by the time the third year rolls around, you have the opportunity to serve a fourth year as chair. But you have to be appointed each year. It’s not a three-year gig.

Standing committees are all listed on a form that gets mailed out to members in the spring. The governors all get appointments from their districts, but how many, and to which committees, depends on the makeup of the committee from year to year as people rotate off.

What I’ve just talked about applies to “funded” positions. You can also be appointed to a committee as an “unfunded” member.

Until the early 1990s, standing committees had a fixed number of members, and each could apply for reimbursement for travel expenses to and from meetings. This was intended to make it easier for members living outside Seattle to take part in committee work.

The downside was that the committees had a fixed number of members. In three years on the board, governors might get to make one appointment to a committee.1 WSBA members could apply for a committee for years on end and never get appointed.

So some observers suggested looking at the American Bar Association system, under which anyone can be on a committee. Why not just open up the WSBA standing committees to everyone?

The BOG decided to try out the idea, but bolted it on to the existing system. So that’s how you get funded and unfunded members, and how you can end up with people who work blocks from the Bar office being reimbursable members while someone who lives in Ellensburg isn’t.2

One other result of the experiment was that some committees ended up with very large memberships for a while. Advocates of the idea expected this, and that over time people would find their level of interest and things would equalize. And in due course that’s what happened, except in a few committees that persuaded the BOG to go back to a fixed membership.3

Mostly, when people apply for standing-committee appointments, they send in the form and wait. Because of the volume of applications, WSBA hasn’t been very good about handling the back end of the process and letting people know they weren’t appointed, but, happily, they are working on that part now. There’s also an idea in the works to create a database of information on members who apply and don’t get appointed: to create a pool of people who are interested in working on Bar stuff the next time a task force or other appointment that relates to members’ areas of interest comes up.4

I mentioned the non-standing-committee appointments and nominations the Bar gets to make. Because those are mainly non-WSBA groups — take the Legal Foundation of Washington board, for example, or the Washington delegation to the ABA House of Delegates — those come up all through the year. The best way to find out about those is in Bar News. But if you are interested in one, you often have to hop to it, because most of the bodies WSBA makes this sort of appointment to never quite remember the lead time required to get copy in the magazine. Those appointments are made by the Board of Governors as a whole, usually on the basis of written submissions from applicants and whatever knowledge governors and anyone else in the room may have about anyone applying.

Here’s how to improve your odds: Make yourself heard.

Call the committee or other body’s chair and get a copy of some recent minutes. Find out what the group has on its plate so you can see if you’re as good a fit as you believe. With that information in head, call your governor.  Tell him/her why you want the appointment (governors love hearing from constituents because they so rarely do, except after they have done something and members don’t like whatever it was they did). Even if you don’t get the slot you had in mind, because they now know you, they’re likely to keep you in mind for something else interesting ere long.

Try it.

Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@thompson-law.com.

NOTES

1 This situation also led to horse-trading, since the Board of Governors made the appointments collectively during their July meeting each year. Conniving, and other Unedifying Scenes, were common.

2  Some have suggested that no one within a to-be-determined radius of Seattle be reimbursable in order to apply the available reimbursement money where it will do the most good, but so far that idea hasn’t gained much traction.

3  The main example of this is the Legislative Committee, which has an intense work period leading up to and during each legislative session, and requires a high level of familiarity with how the lawmaking process works. It’s hard to convene, or poll, a committee of 50 in such an environment, so it was recast as a fixed-membership committee with a core of members who are exempt from the three-year service rule as well — to keep a body of institutional knowledge on hand.

4  WSBA Governor Kristin Olson is chairing a committee working on improving the appointments process, if you want to pass along ideas to her.

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