Board of Governors to meet June 2.

A final look at the Bar's 2006-07 budget and debating a plan to recognize and regulate paralegals will await the Bar Board of Governors at its June 2 meeting in Key West.

The board will also make a variety of appointments, get a wrap-up report on activities from the Florida Legislature's 2005 Regular Session, hear several reports, and get advice from retiring board members.

The board approved next year's fiscal plan at its April 7 meeting. It predicts revenues of $35.4 million and calls for expenditures of almost $34 million. It maintains Bar annual membership fees, for the sixth year in a row, at $265 for active members and $175 for inactive members.

The Board will consider any comments from members on the budget, make further changes if they deem any necessary, and then forward the budget to the Supreme Court.

Complete details of the 2006-07 budget were published in the April 30 Bar News.

Also at its April meeting, the board received the report from the Special Committee to Study Paralegal Regulation. Formed in response to legislation filed to create a state plan to regulate paralegals, it calls for a two-tiered approach. Tier one would be paralegals as current define in Bar rules: Someone qualified by education, experience, or training to work under an attorney's supervision on delegated substantial legal work. Tier two would allow paralegals to hold themselves out as "Florida Registered Paralegals" if they meet experience, education, and continuing education criteria. Rules governing that would be in a new Chapter 20 of Rules Regulating The Florida Bar. The program has a three-year grandfathering window where experienced paralegals who don't otherwise meet the education or certification requirements to gain the "Florida Registered Paralegal" designation.

Any program approved by the board will go to the court as a Bar rules amendment.

The board was scheduled to get a recommendation from the Program Evaluation Committee on a new proposed committee to be formed jointly with the Florida Medical Association. The committee, the result of efforts from President Alan Bookman, would work to improve relations between the state's doctors and lawyers.

Several ethics and advertising issues will be on the agenda.

The board will take up whether an attorney may refer to himself as a "doctor of law" in ad advertisement, an issue it tabled at its last meeting. It is common for lawyers to be referred to as doctors of laws in many Hispanic countries, but most lawyers' degrees do not use that term.

The Professional Ethics Committee will present its recommendation that no changes be made to Ethics Opinion 77-30, which says a lawyer hired to represent an entire county commission has a conflict in representing just one member in proceedings before the State Ethics Commission. Some local governments have questioned that, saying it forces them to hire expensive outside counsel to handle frivolous complaints. The PEC considered the issue and declined to make any changes, but noted the facts of that opinion are narrowly drawn and a different conclusion might result from another case.

The PEC will also preliminarily present two proposed advisory opinions as informational items. One concerns metadata, or information--which could involve confidential work product and attorney-client information--hidden in the background of an electronic document that can be transmitted with the document. The PAO says that sending attorneys should take steps to strip such confidential information from electronic documents, and receiving firms should not try to recover information they reasonably know is confidential.

The second opinion advises that it is okay for attorneys to convert their paper records to electronic documents as long as steps are taken to protect confidentiality and authenticity in the process, and clients can still get printouts of their records. The opinion notes that any documents required by law or rule to be maintained in its original form cannot be maintained exclusively in electronic form.

As the last meeting of the 2005-06 Bar year, the gathering will also give retiring board members an opportunity to offer "Comments for the Good of the Order." Outgoing members have typically used the opportunity to advise on challenges they see the Bar facing or reflect on lessons learned from their board service.