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une 2024 marks the end of my first full membership year as your Member Services Director. It’s been a wonderful year, and I am proud of all the work our staff, Committees, and Section leaders have put in to make it a year full of engagement, education, and fun. Special thanks to the Member Services Team members, Jordan Brock (mainly Sections), Emily Lake (mainly CLE), DeAndre Williams (mainly Committees), Tom Lockyear (mainly Membership), and Casey Almas (mainly Events), who make it all possible.
Our mission statement starts with the following clause: KCBA “promotes and supports a diverse and collegial membership.” This particular portion of the mission stands out for me when considering the purpose of Member Services, because it really is promising that KCBA will do four things:
- Promote a diverse membership
- Support a diverse membership
- Promote a collegial membership
- Support a collegial membership
To promote something means (in this context) “to contribute to the growth or prosperity” of the thing. To support something means “to assist [or] help,” and also “to hold up or serve as a foundation or prop for” the thing. In my role as Member Services Director, I see it as my job to ensure our Member Services Team is providing benefits, education, and opportunities that will grow our membership and make it more diverse; support our members and their varying careers, locations, circumstances, and identities as best we can; and increase and hold up the collegial (“marked by camaraderie among colleagues”) relationships between our members.
Do we live up to these goals? We do try. We definitely misstep, but I believe we are taking the right actions to meet this part (these parts) of our mission.
Promoting a Diverse Membership
This membership year was big for KCBA with regard to our efforts to build diversity within the bar. First, in January, we officially began accepting Limited License Legal Technicians (LLLTs) into our membership. LLLTs are WSBA-licensed legal professionals, and therefore fall within the parameters of KCBA’s membership — we just had never made the move to bring LLLTs into the fold until now. Including LLLTs promotes a diverse membership in two ways: (1) building a membership made up of people filling differing and diverse legal roles in our community, thus allowing us to understand varying perspectives on the legal profession and access to justice issues; and (2) potentially increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of our members by admitting a group of professionals who may have been excluded from traditional opportunities to join the legal profession. We are excited to have the LLLTs among our members and hope we can build from this to consider other non-traditional legal professionals in the future.
In addition, this year brought the launch of our Law Day program. Through this program, we are assisting local courthouses in their efforts to host middle- and high-school students for Law Day activities. This year, we created a playbook for courthouses to help them plan, met with several judges and court administrators on a regular basis, and helped host Law Days at four King County courthouses throughout May. We are excited about this program, because we know that promoting a diverse bar requires diversity among our law students, which in turn requires diversity among our college students. We need to demystify law as a potential career and help our young community members understand the myriad ways they could become a part of the legal profession in the future.
Supporting a Diverse Membership
Even if we diversify our membership, however, we need to ensure we are supporting these many different and unique members. KCBA has a proud history of supporting our newer attorneys, and this year has been no exception. In October and April, we hosted Swearing-In Ceremonies for new attorneys who had recently passed the bar exam, working with the King County Superior Court and Presiding Judges Patrick Oishi and Ketu Shah respectively. Relatedly, KCBA is currently considering how our programming might change or what resources might be added to accommodate the new paths to licensure introduced by the Washington State Bar Association earlier this year. Support for these new paths and the individuals embarking on them will be vital to the strength of the legal profession in the future.
We have also tried to support our diverse membership by providing a diversity of CLE programming throughout the year. Our practice area Sections hosted a whopping 89 one-hour CLEs throughout the year. KCBA also hosted several day-long CLE programs, including Family Law Hot Topics, Probate Administration, Title 11 Guardian Ad Litem Training, Estate Planning for the 99%, and our annual Bench Bar Conference. In October 2023, KCBA launched a three-part CLE series on Racial Bias In Washington Courtrooms, which considered Henderson v. Thompson, a 2022 decision by the Washington Supreme Court requiring an evidentiary hearing when there is a showing of racial bias during trial. Sprinkled throughout the year, we’ve also hosted stand-alone one- to two-hour CLEs on varying topics. In addition, our New Lawyers Division hosts near-monthly CLEs that particularly address issues important to newer attorneys.
Promoting a Collegial Membership
The diversity of our membership bleeds into the next two pieces of the puzzle, to do with a “collegial membership,” because one cannot thrive without consideration of the other.
How do you create camaraderie among a varied group of nearly 5,000 members? This has been a particular challenge since 2020, but KCBA is getting creative to ensure we provide a variety of options. This year, we brought our members together to attend the theater with three outings to the Fifth Avenue Theatre, one to the Seattle Opera, and one to the Village Theatre in Issaquah. We also added the Seattle Kraken, the Sounders FC, and (coming soon) the Seattle Storm to our sporting event offerings. Don’t worry, we will also be back to see the Mariners this summer.
We also provided non-law-related volunteer opportunities to our members with a Food Lifeline volunteering event in the fall. This was a wonderful opportunity for members and their families to give back, have fun, and meet other KCBA members. NLD also hosted a volunteer event in December, bringing together members to assemble care packages for WestSide Baby.
KCBA is working to keep up with our members’ preferences with regard to in-person versus virtual events and CLEs. Nearly every CLE is now hybrid, with some virtual-only. Our Sections all host hybrid or virtual-only meetings to ensure accessibility. We’ve also tried to be creative about bringing different groups of KCBA members together who might benefit from meeting each other. For example, in December we replaced the annual Solo/Small Firm Section’s holiday lunch with a joint holiday happy hour together with members of our Lawyer Referral Service. NLD hosted a mini-golf outing and an escape room outing (both in person only) but also put together two separate virtual speed-networking events so that all members could participate.
One of the best new offerings of this year has been our KCBA Bookclub. The bookclub has been going strong for nearly a year and has read six books (for a total of 12 meetings — one in person and one virtual for each book). This group is highlighted in a separate article on page 15. I am particularly proud that this group includes members as well as KCBA staff, making it one of the only opportunities for staff and members to get truly acquainted. We have several members who come to bookclub nearly every time, and some who come for a particular book pick. Our next book is “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century” by Alice Wong, which we will discuss in person on June 20 and online on June 27.
Supporting a Collegial Membership
Once we’ve built the structure for networking and socializing within our membership, we need to continue to support it. And for this, we need our members’ help. For our 2024–25 membership campaign, we’ve introduced two new member categories to help you help us support ongoing programming. But, of course, support isn’t only monetary.
KCBA needs the help of its members to improve our events, educational offerings, and member benefits — and the best way to help is to join a Board Committee! If you have thoughts on how we can better support community-building within our membership, we would love for you to bring your voice to our Member Services Committee, CLE Committee, or Anti-Racism & Equity Committee. These Committees are full of dedicated members who want to make a difference. And KCBA couldn’t do any of the “promoting” and “supporting” it does without these wonderful volunteers. To join a Committee, go to your MyKCBA page and add the Committee to your profile, or email me at bridgets@kcba.org. Thank you all for being a part of our wonderful community!
