November 2005
The Board’s Work
by Lindsay Thompson
Seattle, September 15, 2005
In WSBA’s calendar, September is the Janus month. The outgoing president outgoes. The incoming president incomes. Governors leave and their successors arrive. The annual meeting (which is not the old, long-canceled bar convention) is held and awards are given.
September’s also a deck-clearing month for the BOG. President Ron Ward summarized a meeting the BOG officers held with the Supreme Court the week earlier. Subjects included the Practice of Law Board’s idea for licensing nonlawyers to do some things legal; court funding; and an American Bar Association team that will do a performance audit of WSBA disciplinary processes for the first time since the early 1990s. That one led to a multiyear effort to increase staff and reduce case backlogs that has by general agreement proved worth the effort.
Another BOG innovation of recent years, the consent calendar, allows for processing a lot of matters not expected to inspire any discussion or controversy: committee appointments, for example. A big slug of such items won approval, saving loads of time.
Lawyer James Connolly of Olympia chairs the Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection. Funded by a surcharge on licensing fees, it makes discretionary payments to clients whose lawyers have cost them money through dishonesty and when there is no other recourse, like insurance. The fund board proposed an amendment of its rules to exonerate people who make claims from liability (such as the lawyer suing them for libel). Since the rule copies one in ELC 2.12, there was not much discussion, and the BOG voted to send it on to the Supreme Court for consideration and action.
Summarizing the Fund’s annual report, Connolly told the Board the Fund authorized $147,000 in gifts over the last year. A lawyer who abandoned his practice and moved overseas, leaving multiple clients in the lurch, largely drove the sum. While about $900,000 remains in the fund, Connolly warned that there are some big potential claims in the pipe for the coming year.
Governor Eron Berg wondered if there was a way to communicate the Fund’s example to other professions in the state, calling it one of the more useful things WSBA does and noting it could set an example.
One of WSBA’s delegates to the American Bar Association, David Tang, having been appointed to a House of Delegates seat from a section to which he belonged, a vacancy was created in the state delegation. After considering a number of candidates, the Board elected Chelan County District Court Judge Thomas Warren to fill the seat, and satisfy a desire several BOG members expressed in getting some more eastern-Washington members into the ABA delegation.
In a nice example of how one member can move the bar association, Everett lawyer Robert Friedman convinced the Board to adopt a resolution calling on Congress to allow veterans to represent them in administrative and judicial proceedings over denial of benefits. Friedman told the BOG the government is not only making it harder to get benefits, but is reviewing hundreds of thousands of past claims to see if any can be terminated. With the law tying one hand behind vets’ backs by effectively denying them counsel, it’s hardly a fair return for services rendered to the nation. The Board approved his resolution.
Barbara Clark is executive director of the Legal Foundation of Washington for another month. After 20 years on the job, she retires in December. WSBA conferred the Award of Merit on her this year, an honor entirely deserved. Under her leadership, LFW has funded legal services to Washington’s poor through seemingly endless legislative attacks and a challenge that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Clark told the Board funding looks increasingly stable for the coming year, and with gradually increasing interest rates, more of it will come in as well. She introduced her successor, Caitlin Davis Carlson, who has run LAW Fund in the past and aced the top job in a national search.
A wild card in the agenda was another report from the Board’s ad hoc committee on governance, which has been laboring away for two years on improvements to how governors and WSBA presidents get elected. The committee rolled out its tentative ideas for governor elections a few months previously, and was keen to get a vote in this meeting so the new governors wouldn’t have to ramp up on the subject.
The committee’s big idea was that some people, in some parts of the congressional districts we use to elect governors, just can’t get elected because there are big population centers elsewhere in the districts. Some districts have informal rotation agreements to try and address this, but the committee felt the BOG should step in and make them fixed and enforceable.
Governor Mike Pontarolo opposed the plan, saying it won’t work in the 5th District, which has lots of thinly populated space and Spokane. He argued a fixed system providing that every several elections a few hundred non-Spokane lawyers would get to elect a governor didn’t really accomplish anything, since his district has the best record for contested elections.
Snohomish County Bar Association President Geoffrey Gibbs told the BOG (a) he didn’t know anything about the plan, and (b), having just heard of it, didn’t think much of it. He argued the proposed rotation for his district wouldn’t really line up with where the lawyers live, which would result in elections skewing toward members in areas where they don’t. He wondered why WSBA should tinker with systems local groups have in place already.
Governor Marcine Anderson cited the dissent of committee member and former WSBA Governor Zulema Hinojos-Fall, who predicted the proposed fixed rotations would create barriers to service and reduce diversity. Governor Randy Gordon, who was leaving the Board and is running for Congress in the 8th District, was disappointed that in his two years on the BOG these issues hadn’t gotten resolved already. He felt the proposed plan clearly wasn’t the answer, citing President Cleveland’s comment that his main achievement was not so much anything he got done “as it was how many damned fool ideas I stopped.”
Governor Andrea Brenneke thought you don’t run a representative democracy from the top down; Governor Mark Johnson called on the BOG to “butt out” of local bar politics.
Overall, the proposal seemed becalmed, if not holed below its waterline, various other views were expressed, for and against. The Board voted 8-6 to table it and go talk to the county bars some more about whether such an idea is really needed.
Along came Steve Crossland, who chairs the Practice of Law Board. He told the Board his board intends to continue to receive input from people on their idea to license and regulate nonlawyers to do some legal things. They hope to have a new discussion draft out in December or January. Crossland referred to the discussion with the Supreme Court (see earlier) but no one outside the big table knew what he was talking about, so I can’t really help you with that bit.
CLE Director Mark Sideman wrapped up the meeting with an interesting report on how WSBA CLE is doing. The report was pretty impressive. Not only are they segueing into streaming media and other technologies to make CLE more accessible, they’ve cut overhead from 49 percent a few years ago to an anticipated 35 percent in 2006.
The Board then went into executive session and everyone else left. After that, the new governors were sworn in and a few hours after that the annual meeting and dinner was held. Lots of people were honored for impressive deeds. You can read about them on page 38 in this issue.
As such events go, it went, in a perhaps record three hours. The new president, Brooke Taylor, outlined his program, which I leave to him to tell you about because presidents get their own column in Bar News. As for me, that’s it. I’m outta here.
