The Gazette 1978

GAZETTE

MARCH 1978

commercials but that the public, educated about the costs and nature of legal services and stimulated by an investigative media, will want all the facts. Black robes, professional jargon, and other legal masks will not protect the profession, the Law Schools, the Courts, or Bar organizations from the full disclosure the public will demand. Questions about costs lead to questions about need, which lead to questions about quality, competence, training, discipline, continuing education, and so on. The public will want to know who runs the organized Bar, how they are elected, what their qualifications are, and what happens if they are not competent. They will want to know if they can get on Bar Association Boards and disciplinary and admission committees. In several States public participation in the decisions of the profession is already the practice. The public will ask with much more impatience than in the past why competent legal services are not available or affordable, why the Courts are crowded, why jails and the prisons are not working, why juvenile justice cannot be improved, why professional discipline is secret and apparently catches so few. In a recent address to law students, Fred Graham, C.B.S. law correspondent, argued that Law Schools should offer courses in Public Relations and in dealing with the news media. This essentially modern proposal makes some sense to me. Given the fact that the legal profession is coming to be perceived as a kind of public property, it follows that it is in Law Schools that initial recognition of this charac- teristic must be established. Chief Justice Burger has spoken about the traditional weakness of Law Schools: "My criticism of Legal Education, beginning when I tried to teach law long, long ago, was that it was good on principles and not good about people. The law in its broadest sense is not an end in itself — it is a tool — a means to an end. And that end is justice as nearly as fallible humans can achieve it — for people and their problems." Whether Public Relations courses would be an adequate answer to the Law School's lack of public focus is dubious. But as a minimum, the practising profession and Law Schools must substantially expand their collaboration in training lawyers to ensure development of leaders and productive members of a profession that is open to the public and organizationally effective. The end of privacy means that lawyers need to develop a new psychology concerning their relationship with the public through their professional organizations. Lawyers by and large do not take great pride in their organisations, and yet it is these organizations that bear ultimate responsibility for the profession's obligations to the public. Maybe it is to be expected that lawyers, trained to be sceptical, are sceptical even of their own organizations. At best they tend to involve themselves on the profession's behalf out of a feeling of noblesse oblige. At worst too many of them regard their organizations as a necessary evil, all too necessary in those States that require membership as a condition of practice. Public Service Is the Objective The view of Bar Association members is too often "What has the Bar done for me lately?" So the profession's work is left to the few, who end up doubly damned when those on the sidelines complain that Bar politicians run the show. The true and historic challenge

for lawyers, privileged by public authority to occupy an exclusive field, is "What can I do for my profession?" For the public, which can have little understanding of or sympathy with a lawyer's apathy about the bar, the relevant question can only be, "What is the profession doing for the public?" There is more to an open legal profession than a new professional psychology and new relationships between lawyers, their Law Schools, and their organizations. These changes are indispensable to effective Public Relations, that is, communications whereby the profession recognizes the public as its audience and begins to address the public about itself. But they are only the means. The produce — public service from lawyers and their organizations in response to public needs — is the objective. Fortunately, we are able to point to expanding attention to both improved communications and professional product. Lawyers are experimenting with Public Relations and accountability through various forms of public participation in their organizations and activities. At the same time they are testing a number of alternatives that flow from their unique training and skills and from their professionalism: expansion of legal services to the indigent; special research projects on specific legal system problems, such as litigation expense and delay; development of public education programs on the law and legal services. They are expanding Bar-sponsored research of law-policy questions, such as the law and medical malpractice, the law and juvenile justice, and the law of energy supply and development. In a sense, the challenge of an open legal profession is to return to fundamentals. If our constitutions, bylaws, and codes of conduct call for promoting the availability of competent legal services, effectively disciplining our members, ensuring a competent judiciary, and developing essential reforms in law and its practice, the public's concern is plain: Is this, in fact, what our record shows? If not, why not? The questions that must be asked and answered are clear: What are the Bar's priority programs? What is their worth in terms of reasonable public expectations? Will members of the profession support the long-range effort law reform necessarily requires? If not, what do we do about it? Should the public subsidize or take over the Do our publications and speeches influence the leadership of our Nation, States and communities? If they don't, what do we do — continue to publish as is, or let the publications perish and spend the money elsewhere? What, if anything, have we provided for public communication in the expensive but widely used audio- visual media? Lawyers are not the only goldfish in the public bowl. U.S. News and World Report's annual survey of "Who Runs America" is a fair inventory of the others. This year the legal profession ranked as the eighteenth most influen- tial institution, outranking radio, cinema, doctors, magazines, and others. Lawyers, of course, would have it no other way. They know that power and influence are the ultimate prizes for their professionalism. But the public demands that power and influence must be exercised for the public, and it judges lawyers' profes- —Continued on next page effort? If so, where do lawyers fit in? The Media Are a "Special Prosecutor"

32