Of course, I work from home and answer my own phone. I have been doing it since 1999 and I prefer it that way.

I agree with you on the dues. But, the issue is whether ABA offers you anything that can help you find clients, including meet and greet seminars, conferences, listservs or anything of the like.

Best to you.

Well when I requested the 50% reduction, they refused, stating it wasn’t available until May or something like that. I’m done. I’m not going to renew.

There are some solos out there doing great, but as I sit here and type this I am struggling for clients, I answer my own phones, and I can’t afford a real office. Why should I pay nearly $200 a year for essentially a monthly magazine?

I retained my active membership and remained active in the Dallas Bar Association, at some cost which discouraged some solo practictioners I urged to join, because, for one thing, many of the extensive and well-done Friday lunch and section CLE programs and handouts from these proved to be of great value.

Legal ethics has always been an interest of mine and I served three active terms, one as subcommittee chair, on the Dallas Bar Association’s Committee on Advisory Legal Ethics Opinions. The ABA got one opinion I, coincidentally with others, requested, right, in detail, while the State Bar’s curt contrary response interpreting identical language was not only wrong but based upon a long-repealed rule. However, I have lost track of the number of times the ABA Committee has flip-flopped on one issue and overlooked the practical realities of family law on others. Their formal opinion that a lawyer had to return a file or document inadvertantly exposed to the other side but was free to copy and use the contents, and a similar one on using metadata and recovered erased language on a document provided in electronic form, etc., were contrary to what the nationally recognized expert from whom I took legal ethics told, us and appalled me.

The ABA or some of its sections and groups did later get actively into some issues which had, more or less unexpectedly, become of great personal and professional interest to me, take some technical positions, on areas of expertise, that I supported, and do some good work, such that, if I were currently on active status and making enough money, I would like to re-join. The main organization never did formally adopt and et behind some of these, however.

There arguably should be a national organization of and for the legal profession as a whole, but none currently exists, given the percentage of the profession who are not ABA members. I’m not sure trying to create or re-create such an organization is feasible, practical, or, given the tendencies of most large organizations, even particularly desirable either to the average lawyer or as a matter of public policy and interest.

I graduated in the upper third of my class at a top-20 law school. The ABA, and too many others, seem to believe all lawyers start at $160,000.00 plus, represent clients for whom cost is no object, and hold certain monolithic social, political, and jurisprudential values and views somewhat inconsistent with those typical of others of similar financial standing. The then U. S. Attorney in Dallas was quoted saying any lawyer who reported less than a fraction of the starting salary at “BigLaw” was a liar, a tax evader, and an incompetent lawyer, in the same issue of Texas Lawyer where the state advertised for lawyers at a starting salary below his cut-off point. I know a lot of good lawyers making too little money, and the brutally simple fact, confirmed by a nationally known expert who speaks at ABA and State Bar classes on this subject, is that the real incomes of existing and new lawyers, like a lot of other people with and without degrees, i.e., clients and would-be clients, have not kept up but fallen over the last generation.

A lot of the lawyers I have discussed this with over the years, and a higher percentage of the younger ones, have told me that they wee not happy about what they were doing. This is a separate and different issue from the income problem. Given what a lot of the better-paid younger and many other lawyers at “BigLaw” are actually doing, the 37% who have reported that they were dissatisfied and unhappy about their work there, years before the current squeeze, is hardly surprising.

Part of this problem was explained by the Dean of the SMU Law School when he told the Dallas Bar, a generation ago, that “Lawyers are doing lower and lower level tasks.” Despite, or maybe because of, modern word processors, computer research, etc., the secretarial and paralegal work in many matters, from commercial real estate to family law, has not been reduced but has mushroomed in volume and cost.

Part is that the average individual or small-business client can’t afford the out of pocket expenses, much less the many more hours of legal work, they need, becuse the income of the average client, with or without one or more college degrees, has failed to keep up much less grow as fast as the expenses and work involved in most legal matters. Unfortunately, I hardly see any organization of lawyers being able to do anything about reversing such negative trends in the U. S. economy that, contrary to the protestations of the politicians of both parties, have been developing for the past thirty years.

Any voluntary organization that hopes to attract and speak for most of the legal profession should get out of the business of taking political positions on
abortion, except maybe to figure out some way to take that out of its primary role in Supreme Court and other judicial confirmation proceedings, and on political questions generally. What makes a lawyer, much less a group of diverse lawyers, any more competent than anyone else to decide issues like that which are essentially maters of religion [in which one must include atheism which rests upon a leap of faith as much as any other], values, and personal preferences.

In the realm of legal expertise where, at first, one might expect a broad-based organization of lawyers to be in a position to offer specially informed advice to its members, to government, and to the voters, you would quickly run up against the modern and curent division between those who believe that the Constitution should have meaning as adopted and amended and those who either don’t or believe it should be rewritten by the courts and Congress to fit their present personal preferences. Both views do offer ways for the Supreme Court to take new conditions and knowledge into account,
but, as the Framers and Founders, including both the Federalists and the Antifederalists who opposed the Constitution’s ratification noted, there is no common ground upon which these two conflicting views could ever be reconciled or accommodated, although there are some, perhaps many, cases in which Justices holding to either theory and applying different rationales can and should arrive at the same result anyway.

The party that leans toward my views on Constitutional interpretation more of the time somehow leans sharply contrary to my views, formed after having practiced in both plaintiffs’ and insurance defense firms, about which commits the most and many of the worst abuses and which way the system has become biased, and too many of its leaders’ attacks upon all “[plaintiffs'] trial lawyers,” as though that were any more fair or rational than any other prejudice. I understand some of the pressures in the U.S. to stay on one side of a docket, though it is not that way in U.S. JAG or British practice, but lawyers [and even lay prospective jurors, witnesses, etc.], or groupsof them, who tell me that all plaintiffs or all defendants are either right or evil have always struck me as blinded or intellectually dishonest. The other side of that problem was typified when the large defensefirms essentially took over the Consumer Law sections of some bars and bar associations, for example.

I’ve been a litigant, on both sides of the docket, and thus a client, which was an extremely frustrating experience even when I won. It is no wonder the lay citizens have so little confidence in the honesty and integrity either of lawyers as a group or of the legal or political system.

Any group that hopes to encompass a large majority of the diverse modern legal profession would necessarily do most of its real work in and through smaller, more or less specialized, sections and committees. Since the organization exists, or should exist, to serve its, or diverse groups of its, members, rather than the members existing to support it, it might well be that member loyalty should run primarily to these smaller constituent entities. Perhaps we would end up with a loose federation of sections, committees, bars, etc., and far lower dues to the umbrella group.

What interests do “lawyers” as a group, or “the profession,” tend to have in common, which are more or less distinct from those of others, that would bring them together in any such organization, which are not better served by other organizations built upon different bases?

When I was on the Dallas Bar’s Professional Economics Committee back when the bar was smaller and more collegial, firms tended to “swarm” at about 25 lawyers, and nobody had ever dreamed of a 2,500 lawyer firm, we discovered how little most lawyers knew about what others in their own building actually did, who was really good in fields of law we didn’t know much about, who could be trusted and everyone at the table knew who I meant when I referred to the Law Firm of Lie & Renege, which I am afraid would have been a lot harder to pin down now that several leading lawyers, including one now holding high judicial office, have told me that they had been ethically bound to lie in the course of cases or when given as a reference by someone they knew was an accomplished con artist, forger and thief.

Shakespeare notwithstanding, good lawyers, even in small towns out here, do lack paying clients, while some who are not trustworthy do not, and, years after retirement, I still get asked who is good at things. Too often, it is impossible for a would-be client to find anyone willing to take on a difficult but valid case either or without the aid of an attorney in the search process.

When I called the State Bar’s Lawyer Referral Service trying to find legal counsel in a matter of mine in which, if it were honest or cared about lawyers, should have been interested, and told them I was broke, they hung up on me. The State Bar’s Committee on Legal Services to the Poor in Civil Cases, who also have a nice fat budget funded by compulsory dues, never responded. One person working with an entity there with a tangential connection to the issue did express interest and offer to try to find me some legal help but could not.

In my experience, which, at one time many years ago, included being consulted by, and serving, in “Jack Spratt” relationships, as a kind of back office and of counsel to, a number of more traditional solo and small firm lawyers, many solo and small firm lawyers had unique strengths and niche practices that were not always readily known to newly admitted job applicants or potential clients, especially in the days of anti-advertising, minimum fee, and other anticompetitive rules. Such relationships and transactions were affirmatively recommended in articles by experts in the official Texas Bar Journal, etc., and covered in general terms in their and my contracts with clients. More recent Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct and official opinions would complicate and restrict such relationships, to the detriment of clients of solo and small firm lawyers, as well as the lawyers themselves. I think some of this rule language may have been aimed at “offshoring” of legal work, but, since I would presume that would have to be and have been covered in detail in the retainer contracts of the big firms doing it, and, given the presumption that, like others, lawyers who write laws and rules know and intend the natural and probable results of their actions, I have reason to and do believe that at least one reason for these changes was to further tilt the balance in favor of the big firms that mostly practice defense and creditors’ rights law, etc. for large enterprises.

Suppose that, instead of trying to repesent or speak for all lawyers in the U. S., this proposed new group went for the limited, targeted market of solo and small firm lawyers in private practice. These do have some common interests, as shown by the interest in Carolyn Elefant’s “My Shingle” and this blog, among others, and such sections of bars and bar associations. The question then arises what, if anything, a national group could and would do for a large number of them that would justify joining and supporting it. I’m not sure I know an answer to that upon which any valid model could or likely would be built.

However, law practice management is my passion. The LPM section has good information that Solos can use and has many books directed at Solos. This section has a recognized group of Practice Management Advisors who are individuals employed by certain state bars to help all of their members with business issues. The only reason I am a member of the ABA is to participate in the LPM section.

If LPM doesn’t have value for you, please address what services you would like the ABA to offer to Solos. All bar associations are struggling with how best to meet its members needs. Any suggestions you have will be appreciated. I look forward to hearing from you.