The Year in Review
King County Bar Association
Justice... Professionalism... Service...Since 1886
By John Cary
Membership Up
It has been a good year for the King County Bar Association. KCBA now has 5,917 members, a comforting increase over the 4,800 members that it had four years ago. 80 law firms support KCBA as Pillars of the Bar--a program recognizing firms that enroll all of their lawyers in KCBA.
As a result of interest shown by members, KCBA will add two new sections, Appellate Law and Environmental Law, to the 15 sections currently maintained.
Proving there is opportunity for play as well as work, in-coming president Gary Maehara organized the Coffee, Cabernet, Chocolate and Cheese event in February. Several sections joined with the East King County Bar Association to provide information about their activities and to offer tastings of wine, coffee, and chocolate. The event was a great success and sure to be repeated next year.
Pro Bono Programs and the King County Bar Foundation Continue Stellar Performance
KCBA does many good things but I often think that the pro bono programs are the best. Last year, 1,420 attorneys volunteered more than 23,000 hours of service to 9,300 poor and vulnerable King County residents. Volunteer services were worth about $4.6 million, which translates into great leverage-- each dollar of contribution creates about $8.54 in service.
King County Bar Foundation board members work tirelessly and with great creativity to help King County lawyers and others to increase their generous support for pro bono. At the beginning of its present configuration in 1993 Ð 94, the foundation raised $75,000. In ten years, it increased the total to $643,148. This year, it expects more than $700,000.
The Breakfast with Champions is the foundation’s hallmark fund-raising event and this year, with author Sherman
Alexie as its speaker, brought in more than $220,000 from 650 lawyers and judges who attended the event. The breakfast is not only a fund-raiser but also one of the great events of the year, a gathering of the community of dedicated pro bono supporters.
The foundation is the largest source of scholarships in the state for minority law students at Seattle University and University of Washington Law Schools.
It distributed $91,000 last year and $110,000 this year. Since it began in 1970, the foundation has assisted over 400 minority law school students.
In addition, the association and the foundation operate the Future of the Law Institute to encourage minority and economically disadvantaged high school students to pursue higher educations and law-related careers. Last year, 60 students spent two days in visiting the courts and attending programs at the law schools to learn the difference between the real legal system and the TV version.
This year, recognizing that civil legal aid needs statewide coordination, the foundation joined with LAW Fund in a new joint appeal to law firms under the name Campaign for Equal Justice. The campaign was a great success with 80 King County firms contributing $340,000, an increase of 22 percent over last year’s combined total from separate campaigns.
Another instance of statewide coordination took place on October 27 when KCBA held one of 19 open houses conducted statewide on the same day to recognize local volunteers and legal aid attorneys and to raise awareness about civil legal aid. No one who attended can forget Judge Richard Jones’ speech or his message that, “Our legal system is bulging at the seams crying out for access to justice for those who can least afford it.”
Martin Luther King Jr. Lunch-- One of the Year’s Great Events
KCBA’s annual lunch commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is always one of the year’s great events. Selling out as soon as it was announced, this year’s lunch featured Deborah Peterson Small whose powerful speech reminded us of the high goals of our profession. Ms. Small pointed out that the disastrous ef-fect of the war on drugs on communities of color is the leading example of racism to-day and that Dr. King would be in the forefront of the movement to reform drug laws. She recognized KCBA’s Drug Policy Project as following in Dr. King’s tradition.
Drug Policy Project Proposes a New Legal Framework for Effective Drug Control
More than four years after its founding, the Drug Policy Project is thriving.
The Drug Policy Project proposed an exit strategy from the failed War on Drugs in its new report, Effective Drug Con-trol: Toward a New Legal Framework. The KCBA board considered the new strategy from August through November, receiving reports on supporting research and hearing from local and federal prosecutors and a specialist in addiction medicine. After publishing a proposed resolution on the KCBA website and taking member comment for a month, the board adopted a resolution endorsing the new strategy in January.
The strategy represents a fundamental shift from a criminal sanctions model to a public health model of drug control. Taking as its guiding principles that public policy should result in no more harm than the use of drugs themselves and that society should seek to reduce the harm directly caused to others by persons using drugs, the resolution calls on the state legislature to establish a commission of experts and stakeholders to recommend the steps necessary for a transition to the new model. The goal of the study is to eliminate the illegal drug market by making it unprofitable, reduce access by youth to drugs, and focus resources on treatment rather than criminal sanctions and prison.
Justice in Jeopardy--First Steps toward Adequate Funding
The Trial Court Funding Task Force estimated the short-fall in justice funding at $200 million and concluded that the county-based funding system, established at the time of statehood, is no longer adequate for the task. The 2005 legislature responded by acknowledging the state’s responsibility to increase its share of funding and making, if not a full down-payment, at least an earnest money payment toward adequate funding. In addition, the legislature established an Office of Civil Legal Aid in the judicial branch so that appropriate attention can be given to the needs of civil legal aid.
Several more sessions of the legislature will be required to reach full funding for the justice system. During that time, KCBA must continue to work with others in the Justice in Jeopardy coalition to advocate enactment of task force recommendations.
Local Discovery Rules-- Streamlining Discovery
As my term began, the Judiciary and Courts Committee (chaired by Jennifer Shaw and in-coming First Vice-President John Ruhl) reported on a year’s work to streamline discovery by limiting the number of interrogatories, depositions and requests for admissions, requiring an early mediation plan in most civil cases, and developing pattern interrogatories.
The board approved the recommendations and delivered them to the Superior Court’s Local Rules Committee in August. After review and modification, the Superior Court issued proposed local rule changes for comment that incorporated much of the recommendations. As I write, the comment period has just expired. Scheduled to become effective in September, the local rule changes should be a significant improvement in local practice.
Coalition Examines Alternative Method of Selecting Judges
Last October, KCBA helped found a coalition to examine alternatives to the current process for selecting judges. Some of the concerns that gave rise to the coalition are: increasingly partisan nature of judicial campaigns; escalating costs; growing amounts of special interest money; shortage of useful information available to voters; and the skewing of results by irrelevant factors such as ballot placement and commonness of names.
The Coalition worked with legislators this year on bills to impose limits on contributions to judicial campaigns similar to those for political office and to establish nominating commissions to propose candidates for appointment by the governor. Although the bills were not enacted, they raised the issues for consideration in future legislatures.
The Coalition is planning a major conference on judicial selection and judicial independence for November 11, 2005, that will carry its work to the next stage of development.
New Project on Judicial Independence in Planning Stages
The national media has recently reported a great deal of controversy over judicial decisions, most prominently, the Schiavo case, and appointments to federal courts. While the controversies largely reflect opposing moral and political positions, the courts and judiciary have increasingly become the battlefield. Collateral damage has ranged from veiled threats against individual judges to proposals to limit court budgets and revise jurisdiction in order to compel pre determined decisions.
At a recent meeting, past presidents of KCBA expressed a strong sentiment that the association should undertake a vigorous defense of judicial independence. As I write, we are beginning planning for a new project. n
John Cary is KCBA president. He can be reached at caryj@att.net.
