October 2002

Letters

Reduced-Fee CLE

WSBA President Dale Carlisle, in the August 2002 Bar News, pointed out that many lawyers are heavily burdened with debt due to educational expenses or due to the lower pay scales of public-service employment. One solution, he suggested, would be reduced-fee CLE programs for young lawyers.

To further this objective, the Northwest Digital Law Library and the Seattle University School of Law, with the assistance of WSBA Professionalism Counsel Barrie Althoff, are sponsoring a free ethics CLE program on October 25. The program will be held, beginning at 9:00 a.m., at the Pigott Building Auditorium of the Seattle University Campus, near 12th and Union. As a cost-saving measure, participants are asked to download and print the written materials from the http://www.freecle.com/ Web site prior to coming to the seminar.

Congratulations to Bar News and to Guest Editor Patricia Novotny for the candid assessment of the "Super Lawyer" silliness visited upon us by Washington Law & Politics magazine every year. (To dispel any notions of sour grapes, I was included as a Super Lawyer in the 2001 edition, but for reasons unknown I did not make it on this year's list.)

I think most lawyers will acknowledge what Ms. Novotny observed, that the "Super Lawyer" list does not accurately reflect merit. As long as we all recognize this for what it is — a play on our egos to generate advertising revenue, there is no harm. Harm may come, however, from lawyers touting their Super Lawyer status to existing or potential clients that do not understand the dubious designation process used by Washington Law & Politics.

I congratulate those who were named "Super Lawyers" this year, and I acknowledge that many of you deserve it. Let's just keep it amongst ourselves, shall we?

If you were an actress, would you need to know the questions posed by the "blue ribbon panel" of judges chosen by the National Inquirer to make up a list of Super Actresses? If you were looking to spend a great deal of money on a service, would you review evaluations of service providers listed in a magazine without paying subscribers, and which is supported only by advertising? Do you think the clients who chose their attorney because she was listed as a "Super Lawyer" in the local version of Law & Politics for her work advising Enron are happy today?

If you really don't know whether or not you are a Super Lawyer, make a list of the questions you think would root out the answer and send it to your clients. Wait for the response. If you don't hear that you are a Super Lawyer, buy a farm in Montana and raise goats. Bottom line: if your clients don't think you are a Super Lawyer, it doesn't even matter if you think you are.

Readers are invited to submit letters of reasonable length to the editor. They may be sent via e-mail to comm@ wsba.org  or provided on disk in any conventional format with accompanying hard copy. Due date is the 10th of the month for the second issue following, e.g., May 10 for publication in the July issue. The editor reserves the right to select excerpts for publication or edit them as appropriate.