May 2001

WSBA President Sought. No Smoke-Filled Room Required. 

by Lindsay Thompson

In America, anyone can grow up to be the president. It’s one of the chances we take.

— Adlai Stevenson

For those who puzzle, however fleetingly, over such things, one of Life’s Imponderables is how the Washington State Bar Association gets its presidents. I’m not only going to tell you in the paragraphs to follow, I’m going to invite you to apply for the job.

Every October a new president shows up on the cover of Bar News, and in a year he — I say that because, with only two exceptions in the last 15 years, it is always he — is gone. The president writes 12 columns in the Bar News, and for most Bar members that’s as much presidential contact as we get.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. People are busy. They have law practices, civic commitments and families, and crave time off. I suspect most are quite content to let the Bar be run by people who feel a calling for that sort of thing.

If you go to local Bar Association meetings, or are involved in minority and specialty bars, committees or sections of the Association, you may have other WSBA presidential sightings to your credit. You can catch them in newspaper interviews and the occasional television or radio appearance.

Watching state Bar presidents has been one of the eccentric hobbies of my misspent youth and early middle age. I’ve worked with 13 or 14 in a row, and have met about 30 of the 68 presidents the WSBA has had since being formally organized in 1933.

What I’ve learned, hovering in the twilight penumbras of power, is that being Bar president is a bigger, more challenging job than most people suppose. And I have learned that more people need to consider standing for a turn at the helm.

First, the official facts: Applications for 2002-2003 president of the WSBA will be accepted through May 15, 2001, and should be limited to a current résumé, a concise application letter stating interest and qualifications, and no less than five or more than 10 selected references. Endorsement letters received by May 31, 2001 will be considered by the Presidential Search Committee and the Board of Governors. Applications and endorsement letters should be sent to the WSBA, Office of the Executive Director, 2101 Fourth Avenue, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.

Confidential interviews with the Presidential Search Committee will be conducted between May 16 and 31 at the offices of the Washington State Bar Association. Direct contact with the governors is also encouraged. All candidates will have an interview with the full Board of Governors in open session at the June meeting. Selection of the president will be made by the board following the interviews.

Although prior experience on the WSBA’s Board of Governors may be helpful, there is no requirement that one must have been a member of the Board of Governors or had previous experience in Bar activities. The candidate must be willing to devote a substantial number of hours to WSBA affairs and be capable of being a positive representative for the legal profession. The position is unpaid. Some expenses, such as WSBA-related travel, are reimbursed.

The commitment begins in June 2001 following selection. A one-year term as president-elect will begin at the WSBA annual business meeting in September 2001. The president-elect is expected to attend two-day board meetings held approximately every five to six weeks, as well as numerous subcommittee, section, regional, national and local meetings. In September 2002, at the annual business meeting, the president-elect will assume the position of president. During his or her service, the president-elect and president will also be required to meet with members of the Bar, courts, media and public and legal interest groups, as well as be involved in the Bar’s legislative activities. Appropriate time will need to be devoted to communication by letter, electronic mail and telephone in connection with these responsibilities.

The duties and responsibilities of the president are set forth in the WSBA Bylaws.

So that’s the job in a nutshell. Along with several colleagues on the Board of Governors, I’m on a committee to conduct the search for the next Bar president. Chosen by the Board of Governors, he or she will take office in 2002, after serving a year as president-elect.

One of the main things presidents do is run Board of Governors’ meetings. This can be a challenge. Part of the lore of the board is that "the board will do what the board will do." One former president likened presiding over board meetings to herding cats. Another, coming to the presidency after a number of years away from the board, announced a long personal agenda for the year, each item of which the board promptly voted down. Still another left the table to talk with someone on the sidelines during a meeting. A member of the board took control of the meeting and cheerfully began directing it to topics of more interest to him. "Come back, come back!" members began shouting to the president.

Other presidents have shown remarkable skill at getting the board to do things they really didn’t want to do. Being a persuasive advocate helps. And having a good sense of humor is a plus.

In addition to the rough and tumble of board meetings, presidents meet with the Supreme Court and testify before the Legislature. They are, in many ways, the public face of our profession during their time in office. Dick Eymann, the last president, and Jan Eric Peterson, the incumbent, have estimated that being president takes about 60 to 65 percent of their work time for their year in office.

It’s a big job — no two ways about it — and that’s why more people should consider seeking it.

You see, most of the time the pool from which presidents get drawn is that of former members of the Board of Governors. The job rotates between Eastern Washington, Western Washington and King County in an age-old compromise to ensure some rough parity of geographic and population balance.

This year we’re looking for someone in King County. All you have to do is send in a current résumé, a letter saying "I want to be president," and give us five to 10 references. People can write endorsement letters for you. Our committee will make recommendations to the Board of Governors, who will choose the president-elect. The exact process gets a little fuzzy at this point, since we never know how many candidates there will be, but we adapt to the circumstances. Last year there were three, and we invited them in for a pitch to the board. Then we voted and chose one, Dale Carlisle.

Into the late 1980s the election of the president was done in closed session. The board conducted a search, then either developed a consensus for someone or slugged it out between more than one, then came out and announced the choice. Later, in what was considered dramatic liberalization for the times, they came out of closed session and held their vote in public. I call this the board’s "politburo period." The hands went up; the unanimous vote was recorded.

Now, nearly the whole process is done in public, complete with angst-ridden comments by board members about how hard it is, and insights from Bar organization liaisons. (The bit that gets discussed in closed session is anything potentially embarrassing in a candidate’s record.)

But back to electing Dale Carlisle.

Dale’s election was, and is, significant because it demonstrates an increasing willingness to look outside the "usual suspects": people who served their three years on the board and later returned to be president for a year. Dale served only a year on the Board of Governors before throwing his hand in the rain, as did another member of the board, Steve Henderson from Olympia. The 1999-2000 president, Dick Eymann, likewise spent only a year on the board before being chosen president-elect and president. His previous experience was in politics and with the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association.

This recent experience suggests that getting up to speed on the job is easier than people used to think. One reason is that several years ago the board institutionalized the position of president-elect. The theory for this, advanced by a task force on governance in 1995, was that the board could reach further to candidates who had not served as governors if those candidates then got a year to sit in on all meetings and get up to speed on the operations of the board and the Bar. WSBA staff are much better organized to support the president now than used to be the case. That takes a lot of the logistical burdens away.

Some presidents think service on the board should be a prerequisite; others think not. As things stand, it’s not a requirement, but tends to be the result.

It’s important that we continue our progress and cast a wider net for the presidency than we have in the past. Some members, of course, scoff, and dismiss such ideas as the rhetorical flourishes of Seattle liberals who never saw a trendy idea they didn’t like; others circle the wagons, cowering in fear that the endless and God-given priority of white males will be irreverently, irrevocably broken, with the Deluge to follow.

People can, of course, think what they like. But read the papers. The census figures now being released record dramatic ethnic changes in our population over the last 10 years. The New York Times reported in March that, nationwide, over half of all law students are women, up from 10 percent just 30 years ago.

Change is happening underneath us. The Young Lawyers Division, our most youthful membership cohort, is running circles around the rest of the Bar in opening its leadership to all of its members — women, minorities — and without stacking decks, or lots of promotional fuss. They just looked around and saw their membership changing. Rightly, they decided you can’t run a whole organization by drawing from only part of its membership. Change will come upon us; we should welcome it rather than let it arrive amidst fracture, upheaval and contentiousness.

Change is also hard. It requires us to look at things differently, and consider the views of people we don’t know. In addition to ethnic change in the general population, during the careers of many of our members the membership of the Bar Association has exploded in size. Old senses of connection have been lost.

But the thing about change is that it keeps coming. You can adapt to it; you can try to manage it to some extent; and you can bitch and moan about it. As your elected leadership, the Board of Governors is constantly trying to adapt the institution of the Bar Association to changing times. And one of the ways we are doing that is to encourage more people to run for president. We need leaders to look like all of us.

Yesterday’s Young Lawyers Division is today’s mainstream of the Bar Association membership, and tomorrow’s Bar leadership. As slowly as the Bar seems to change, it does change. We are serious about diversifying your leadership. But you have to help us. Come forward; put your name in; take the chance; be a president.Lindsay Thompson is a member of the Board of Governors for the 7th Congressional District. He practices law in Seattle.

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