Nine Lives
By John C. Keeeney Jr.
One of the delightful surprises of being your president is how often I am asked by members how they can be of assistance. Your outpouring of voluntary support is greatly appreciated. The Bar is wholly dependent on volunteer efforts to address important issues. I very much need your help, and look forward to working with many of you. Here is how your help is most needed.
1. Be a hearing committee member in our disciplinary system. The District of Columbia has a unique reliance on volunteer lawyers and laypersons to decide appropriate legal discipline. The disciplinary system could not function without the extremely hardworking dedication of the 55 volunteers who serve on the 12 hearing committees and as alternates.
Hearing committee members reflect the conscience and values of our profession and our community. Their decisions bring the collective diverse experience of all parts of the Bar to difficult issues of ethical violations and appropriate penalties. It is a very important role. Their day-to-day task must dispel the perception that lawyer discipline is unfair to any category of Bar members. Thus, it is critically important that lawyers of every color, nationality, and gender, from practices of varying sizes but particularly solo practitioners and small firm members, be available for substantive work as hearing committee members. Without the help of all of us, disciplinary committees would not reflect the representative judgment of peers in the Bar.
Disciplinary committees sit in three-member panels and write several decisions annually. The work of a hearing committee member is underappreciated by many. But it is truly valued work, where you can make a major contribution to the fair treatment of all.
2. Serve on a Bar committee. Bar committees span our profession’s broad interests in pro bono, ethics, continuing legal education, lawyer counseling, and practice assistance. They also include special committees such as those recently chaired by John Payton on disciplinary system reform and by Jim Sandman on multijurisdictional practice. Hundreds of Bar members volunteer their time and expertise to these tasks.
My first Bar work was on its Public Service Activities Committee, now the Pro Bono Committee, with members Steve Pollak and Sally Determan, both past Bar presidents, and Joan Strand, John Nields, and Shirley Higuchi, who became future presidents. That committee made a big difference then and, with your help, it can continue to make a difference.
3. Support your local legal service providers. Your time and your money are both needed, as no bar dues can be spent for pro bono by referendum of the membership in the 1980s. Local unmet civil legal needs include family law, immigration, landlord–tenant matters, and consumer protection, to name only a few. These needs persist even with our outstanding pro bono tradition. For example, the Bar’s flagship pro bono program, the Wednesday night law firm clinic, is serving fewer clients today with fewer volunteer lawyers. Having led my firm at the first law firm clinic night in September 1993, I can share my personal experience that your participation can make a profound difference in the life of a client.
4. Enable others to do pro bono and public service. Aspirational words are often not enough. It is necessary to cut red tape in our workplaces and in a practical way enable others to do public service. The laissez-faire philosophy is not good enough anymore when the profession’s incentives are stacked so heavily toward greater billable hours at the cost of public service and family time.
5. Lend your personal support to the diversity of our bar. This mandatory bar has strength through its diversity. The diverse voluntary bar associations in this city celebrate that diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender among our members. The voluntary bars serve historic functions as they honor the progress of our pioneering predecessors, but also measure the remaining gaps as we move forward together toward the goal of abolition of all glass ceilings. Sponsorship of voluntary bar events, and most importantly actual attendance and participation, keep equality for all at the forefront.
6. Share your knowledge with others. Our continuing legal education courses, voluntary as they should be, attract thousands of local lawyers by the quality, breadth, and depth of their content. These courses, taught by volunteers, raise the standard of practice in this city. You too can help, no matter how specialized your practice.
7. Get active in the D.C. Bar sections. The expertise of our sections is unmatched, and their 21 subject areas provide numerous opportunities for teaching, leadership, and community outreach.
8. Mentor our less experienced members. In these days of high billable hour quotas, good mentors are hard to find. Be a mentor, and your influence will be enormous both in your own workplace and beyond. Professional life is so much more than billable hours. Share with others your experience that the true measure of a professional is not calculated by the size of his or her earnings.
9. By your example, change the public’s bad image of lawyers. Widespread lawyer jokes reveal the depth of the angry perception about us. Our public persona is no longer that of heroic Perry Mason or Atticus Finch. That idealistic image from To Kill a Mockingbird has been replaced by one of greed and deceit in The Firm and The Pelican Brief. But perceptions can be overcome, one person at a time, by hardworking, conscientious lawyers of public spirit and idealism. Please be one of them, treat our profession (but never ourselves) more seriously, and join me in refusing to laugh at lawyer jokes.
No one can live all nine of these suggestions. But each of us can do at least one. Collectively, it will make a big difference.
