July 1999 

 Pride and Hope

by Wood R. Foster Jr.

What are your bar leaders thinking? View our archives of President's Page columns.

View the report of the ABA Commission on Multi-Disciplinary Practice.

Learn what the MSBA is doing in response to the issue.

Predicting the future is hard work. Shaping it is even harder. As we approach the millennium, we can either take a reactive "wait-and-see" attitude about our collective future, or we can roll up our sleeves, ask the hard questions, and try to come up with insightful answers.

The work of trying to shape a professional course in an uncertain future is a task I relish. The very prospect of this work prompted me to submit my name as the Hennepin County candidate for secretary of the Minnesota State Bar Association in 1996. I believed then, and I believe now, that lawyers will be receptive to a meaningful dialogue on the future of Minnesota's legal profession as the year 2000 becomes virtual reality. To some, perhaps, January 1, 2000, is just another day. I prefer to think that most of us cannot help but want to engage in some meaningful self-analysis -- taking stock, if nothing else, as the millennial milestone rushes up on us.

The first step in this dialogue was the recent publication of For the Record, a copy of which should have reached you by now. Any lawyer with even a mild interest in knowing something about the professional continuum of which each of us is a part should be able to find material of interest in For the Record. As someone who invested deeply in the project, I promise you that there is much about our mutual past that can and will inform our collective future. Indeed, it is now difficult for me to imagine a dialogue on the future of the profession that is not based on an understanding of its past.

Considering the fact that our profession is rooted in the past in practical terms (stare decisis, common law, dusty constitutions), we have virtually no institutional memory about the legal profession itself. Authors of For the Record found surprisingly little hard information on which to build; reliable records on even as fundamental a question as the precise number of lawyers in Minnesota did not exist before 1960.

Wood R. Foster Jr. is president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. A partner in the firm of Siegel, Brill, Greupner, Duffy & Foster, PA, he concentrates his practice in commercial litigation and class action. He is a graduate of Amherst College (1965) and of the University of Michigan Law School (1968).

This search for our Minnesota roots -- the process of "anchoring" in the current futurist lingo -- was not only worthwhile, it was exciting. The product of the search for our past is a platform of hope from which we can launch our venture into the next century. That hope is the child of a justifiable -- and now documented -- pride that stems from a realization that Minnesota lawyers, for whatever reason, have provided national leadership in a host of ways that offer the solid promise of "more of the same."

For the Record affords us a glimpse of the practice of law in Minnesota as a whole, allowing its indistinct and changing boundaries to emerge more clearly than they do as we look out from our individual day-to-day perspectives. The vantage point that emerges constitutes a prospect from which to observe and evaluate the movements and skirmishes that changed the face and the direction of the legal profession in Minnesota.

The importance of looking at our past is not merely theoretical. As we attempt to address the future of our profession, the insights offered by a full appreciation of the startling demographic changes that have overtaken the profession since 1970 will be critical to our success. Those changes, both quantitative and qualitative, have had dramatic impact on our profession in term of its size, its diversity, its expectations and rewards, its demands on the court system, etc. The proliferation of specialty practices, the emergence of megafirms, the growth of complex and class litigation, the development of public defense and legal service organizations, the appearance of entirely new fields of law, and a host of other changes have characterized the last 30 years. For the Record collects and highlights these changes; in the past, only anecdotal evidence was available.

Complementing -- and provoking -- the many changes in the legal profession, of course, are technical and societal changes that have been just as dramatic, including increasing public and professional litigiousness and declining public and professional civility.

I submit that an understanding of the remarkably rapid and pervasive nature of these changes over the last 30 years is critical to any effort to predict, and hopefully to influence, the next 30. Even as this column is written, the American Bar Association takes up the report of its Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice, raising issues that promise to be both controversial and (for some, at least) very threatening. In a nutshell, the report recommends an extensive overhaul of the rules of professional conduct so as to allow lawyers and non-lawyers to join forces to offer multiple services, including legal services, to the public. You can find the report (which is remarkably concise) at http://www.abanet.org/. If implemented, the proposal has the potential to change basic public and professional concepts about the delivery of legal services. Much more will be written and spoken on this subject in the months ahead, but it is only one of the many issues that face Minnesota lawyers as we enter the 21st century.

Of this I am sure: the leadership offered by Minnesota lawyers in the past, the initiatives that have been incubated here and copied elsewhere, and the quality of practice that has developed in this state give us every reason for great hope as we look ahead. I have already begun a personal dialogue about the profession's future with groups of lawyers around the state, a dialogue I hope to expand as my term of office proceeds. Please join me in this process.

Thank you for the confidence you have shown in me; I am honored to serve as your president.