In the "be careful what you wish for" category, I got word today of appointment to the Georgia Courts Automation Commission. The enacting legislation in 1990 authorized the Commission to:

  • Define, implement, and administer a state-wide courts automation system;
  • Coordinate and cooperate with the state’s chief information officer with regard to planning, implementation, and administration of a state-wide courts automation system to take advantage of existing state resources where possible;
  • Receive electronic data from the civil case filing and disposition forms that are required to be filed in civil cases and that are transmitted to the commission by the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority in a format and media agreed to by the commission and the authority;
  •  Compile the civil filings and dispositions data, and provide such data to the Administrative Office of the Courts;
  •  Participate in agreements, contracts, and networks necessary or convenient for the performance of these duties and for the release of the information from civil case filing and disposition forms;
  •  Administer federal, state, local, and other public or private funds made available to it for implementation of the courts automation system;
  • Coordinate state-wide strategies and plans for incorporating county and local governments into the courts automation system, including review of requirements of the several state agencies for documents, reports, and forms and the consolidation, elimination, or conversion of such documents, reports, and forms to formats compatible with electronic transmittal media;
  •  Establish policies and procedures, rules and regulations, and technical and performance standards for county and local government access to the courts automation system network; and
  • Offer advisory services to county and local governments to assist in guiding their efforts toward automating their court procedures and operations.

Since a high percentage of my work is in federal courts where online civil filing is universal and relatively user-friendly, I’ve grown accustomed to being able to file a pleading electronically and have it on the judge’s computer almost instantly.  Naturally, I would love to have the same thing in the state courts where I otherwise prefer to practice.  But online civil filing is just one piece of the puzzle.  An old friend who is a Superior Court judge told me recently of his adventures trying to automate his court where the far greater portion of the  caseload involves divorce, child support, criminal prosecutions, and other matters, many of which are filed without an attorney.  

To bring all the multiple courts in 159 Georgia counties into the 21st century is quite a challenge — technological, financial and political. It will not happen overnight.

Last Saturday, I took office as secretary of the State Bar of Georgia, having been elected by a comfortable margin in a statewide Bar election. Other than taking roll and asking approval of minutes at meetings of the Board of Governors, the duties of the secretary are loosely defined.  For the next year I will assist the other officers as requested, work more or less informally with several Bar committees to move forward upgrades in practices, procedures and ethics rules, an immerse myself in learning all there is to know about the Bar’s finances. If things follow the typical pattern,

Today Governor Perdue vetoed raises for Superior Court judges and District Attorneys. In a statement released with the veto, the Governor said, “I have consistently expressed concern with raising judicial officers’ salaries without tackling the well above-market retirement benefits.” He also said that a study he commissioned showed that Georgia’s judges’ pay was competitive compared to judges in other states and compared to “various counsel.” That study also showed that the Georgia “judiciary’s retirement benefits are far above market average.”

What he did not say is that the study he commissioned compared judicial salaries with base salaries of a

Ron Ellington, a professor at the University of Georgia Law School, recently spoke to the inductees of Phi Beta Kappa at UGA. His remarks deserve wider distribution.  He points out how the smartest and wisest leaders of a previous generation were dead wrong on one big issue, and suggests how to recognize when we are wrong.

  1. Be humble.
  2. Be intellectually honest and strive for objectivity. Be open minded to evidence / facts that may challenge or run counter to your initial views.
  3. Look for anomalies.

The full text of Professor Ellington’s remarks appears below.

The State Bar of Georgia election ballots have been counted. I will be Secretary of the State Bar beginning in June.

When you see a turtle on a fence post, you know somebody put him there.  A lot of hard working Georgia lawyers put me on this fence post.  For them, I will keep my focus on practical, nuts and bolts matters affecting the everyday practice of law.

My opponent, Nancy Whaley, ran a strong race and really made me work for it. I commend her hard work and willingness to serve. She has a bright future.

I look

Lawyers who are accessible to their firms and clients 24/7/365 lead more stressful lives, burn out faster, and too often fail in their important roles in families and communities.  That is the essence of a report from the New York State Bar Association’s Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law.

When young lawyers are frequently at their desks on Saturdays,  they are not spending free time with their families. And too often they are not making time for the citizenship activities that have been the traditional obligation of lawyers. One contributing factor is technology. E-mail, BlackBerrys, cell phones and other devices make it possible for lawyers to be always on call to their firms and clients.

After 30 years practicing law in the trenches, I have seen pretty much all sides of this.  I spent way too many Saturdays at the office as a young lawyer in a firm where everyone was expected to "show the flag" on Saturday. However, I made it to most of my kids’ sports events and a lot of Boy Scout weekend trips. However, to my everlasting regret, I remained chained to the desk when I should have accompanied my son on Boy Scout trips rafting through the Grand Canyon and canoeing through a Canadian wilderness.  Those opportunities do not come twice.

The flip side of the coin is that technology enables us to respond to client needs away from the office.  There have been times when I was able to use a PDA to quickly deal with a question from home or on vacation, and get back to family matters.  The challenge is to remain the master of the technology, and not to let it master you.  For me, one positive change has been the switch from an intrusive Blackberry to another device that lets me check for messages when I choose rather than constantly vibrating in my pocket.

I know lawyers in firms both large and small who have done an admirable job of being there for their families on a regular basis.  My brother-in-law, who is in charge of the business and real estate practice at a large firm in another state, comes to mind as an example.  He found the time to be there for his son’s sports and Scouting activities, including a lot of weekend travel, chaired major projects in the church, and has served on numerous significant boards in his city. 

On the other hand, I know lawyers in firms both large and small who have been chained to their desks almost every Saturday and Sunday, missing out on much that is important in life.

When I was coming up, in the days before rampant lawyer advertising, the only way a lawyer could advertise was to be active in the community.  Therefore, lawyers were drawn to service in civic clubs, service organizations, and in public office.  Now too often those roles are seen as unnecessary burdens and distractions. Our profession and our communities are poorer in many ways because so many people with the intelligence, energy and training that it takes to become successful in the legal profession have been withdrawn from those roles.

But there are cautionary examples of lawyers who launch so deeply into the outside roles that they are overwhelmed by economics.  I once knew a young lawyer whose legislative service was making it too hard to make a living practicing law.  When the commission chairman of a large urban county resigned, this young lawyer quit the legislature to run for chairman against a high profile candidate with a famous family name.  I thought he would go down to defeat in a blaze of publicity, and get back to practicing law.  However, he "won" a full-time, high profile public office with a salary of $17,000 a year that precluded any significant law practice. The sad end of that story is that in need of funds for his growing family, he stepped on to a slippery slope that led to a term in "Club Fed."

One of the challenges for Bar leaders is to find ways to alter the dynamic so that lawyers and law firms might find ways to meld  family and community involvement with law practice in ways that contribute to  their own long term professional and financial success.  Nobody said it would be easy.

Today thousands of members of the State Bar of Georgia received their ballots for the State Bar election. I am a candidate in the only contested statewide race, for the office of Secretary.

For some insight into why I am doing this, see:

Active members of the Georgia Bar may vote by mail or online at gabar.org using the individual verification code on the paper ballot. 

Both candidates have done roughly comparable amounts of work on Bar

Some of my friends have asked why in the world I would take time from my busy law practice for volunteer service on the State Bar Executive Committee and now to run for Secretary of the State Bar of Georgia. That’s a fair question that deserves an answer more serious than, “it’s on my bucket list.”

Perhaps the fact that one would campaign statewide, spending precious time and money competing for a job that does not pay, is proof of one’s unfitness for the office and of the continuing validity of the “Peter Principle.”

However, even after all these years practicing law “in the trenches,” I’m still just idealistic enough to believe we all have an obligation to improve the law and our profession. Together we have an opportunity to improve both the perception and the reality of our profession and court system. After thirty years in this profession, and fifteen years learning how to get things done in the State Bar, I want to do my part. That does not take from my law practice, but ultimately strengthens it.

The State Bar’s public service ads you may have seen recently on TV are paid for with lawyers’ voluntary contributions to the Legislative  & Advocacy Fund. The ads are a good step in the right direction but  they are not enough.

In order to make progress, we must maintain continuity of effort and leadership over a period of years to

? reinforce virtue in our own ranks,
? address practical, nuts and bolts issues that affect our
representation of clients and our lives as practicing attorneys,
? heighten the public’s recognition of the importance of independent lawyers and judges in upholding their freedoms, and
? improve liaisons with the legislative and executive branches of state  government, with the business community, and with other professional  organizations in Georgia.

Anything the Bar considers doing should be measured by the test of practicality and common sense.  We should keep in mind a few of rules of thumb for practicality:

  • The KISS principle, though it is hard to keep anything simple in law. Ideas that sound great in theory fall flat if they are so complicated that they increase transaction cost beyond what the market can bear.
  • Remember that the perfect is often the enemy of the good, and that the toughest choices are not between good and bad, but between good and good and between bad and bad.
  • In the words of  Larry the Cable Guy, “Get ‘er done.” While some things the Bar does can legitimately take several years of study and deliberation, a lot of practical projects need a fast track approach. There is no reason why some of these projects — which I won’t name here — should take longer than it took the US to win World War II.  Recruit lawyers who already have expertise in the subject matter for a short term project team, get the job done, and move on.

When new issues come out of left field – such as the Fulton County courthouse murders and their aftermath, the out-of-state advertising  lawyers descending on Savannah after the recent sugar plant explosion,  the ripple effects of volatility in financial markets, a proposal for  a sales tax on legal services, or whatever may be next – it is  important to have people at the helm with career experiences that  enable them to speak for a broad cross-section of practicing Georgia attorneys.

Now that the opportunity has arisen to move up the State Bar leadership ladder, I realize that the circuitous path of my career over the past thirty plus years may have prepared me reasonably well to represent a cross-section of practicing lawyers in Georgia.  It is somewhat startling to realize that I’m the:

  • Only candidate in private law practice, supporting a family by representing clients who are free to choose someone else.
  • Only candidate who is a former prosecutor.
  • Only candidate who is a a current member of the State Bar Executive Committee, elected by the Board of Governors
  • Only candidate who is AV rated in Martindale-Hubbell.
  • Only candidate listed among “Legal Elite” in Georgia Trend magazine.
  • Only candidate listed in Martindale’s Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers.
  • Only candidate with specialty certification: Certified Civil Trial Advocate, National Board of Trial Advocacy.
  • Only candidate who is a Master of American Inns of Court(Lamar Inn, Emory Law School)
  • Only candidate on faculty of Emory Law School Trial Techniques Program.

And I admit that I sometimes enjoy the “chess game” of helping to run an organization larger than my law practice, enjoy having a place at the table when issues affecting our profession are decided, and to some extent may have this on my “bucket list.”

Before election to the State Bar Board of Governors, during the 1990’s I went through a sequence of offices in the Tort & Insurance Practice Section — Secretary-Treasurer, Section Chair, and then a few years as Legislative Chair. When I became Section Chair in June 1994, I sat down at breakfast with a mix of plaintiff and defense lawyers to map a consensus legislative strategy.  While I was by then in plaintiffs’ practice, some of the most respected insurance defense lawyers in the state were involved.

That month I appointed small ad hoc task forces co-chaired by defense and plaintiff attorneys and filled with both plaintiff and defense lawyers with practical experience on the issues they would address. Each had sixty days to report back with a bill drafted.  By the end of the summer we had half a dozen legislative proposals and had found some allies. Our bills cleared the State Bar Advisory Committee on Legislation and the Board of Governors by October, and we lined up sponsors in the General Assembly. Along with other members of our team, I met with legislators and testified before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Along the way, we did meet some opposition that slowed us down.  And we added another one in a subsequent year.  However, with perseverance we eventually saw several of our proposals enacted into law. Those include:

  • O.C.G.A. § 33-24-56.1.  Full compensation rule on reimbursement of first party insurance benefits out of injury settlements helps facilitate reasonable settlements of tort cases.
  • O.C.G.A. § 9-11-30(b)(4). Amendment authorizes use of video depositions by notice, rather than old requirement of a court order or stipulation of counsel prior to video recording of depositions.
  • O.C.G.A. § 9-11-4(f)(3)(B)(iii) conforms to the federal rule and the Hague Convention, permitting international service of process by mail unless prohibited by the receiving country.
  • O.C.G.A. § 9-10-93 provides for venue over resident and nonresident defendants in the county of the resident defendant. Previously it was necessary to have independent grounds of venue against resident and nonresident defendants, so that it was sometimes impossible to include both in the same action.

These statutes are clearly not of equal magnitude with the Civil Rights Act of 1965.  However, they are illustrations of a process of developing consensus within the Bar on practical, nuts and bolts issues affecting the practice of law, and then patiently working through the steps to get them enacted into law.

The Georgia  Bar Center in downtown Atlanta was previously the Federal Reserve Bank building.  A great stone edifice with bulletproof glass windows, it is built like a fortress.  It even has a currently unused shooting range in the basement which in the old days armored car guards and Secret Service used for practice.

When a tornado ripped through downtown Atlanta last week, severely damaging buildings for blocks around it, the Bar Center was undamaged. It stood like a rock. While the Omni Hotel and CNN Center a block away lost a lot of glass, the Bar Center’s bulletproof windows