Learning From the Past--Looking to the Future.

This year I turned 50. So did The Florida Bar. Of course, unlike our organization, I dreaded that birthday for the two preceding years. As the date drew closer, I wondered whether I should even celebrate. I could not imagine a party or a present that would make turning 50 a happy occasion. One day I began sharing these concerns with my good friend Raquel Matas. She immediately reprimanded me but gave me the greatest gift of all: She told me--in no uncertain terms--that I was lucky to be turning 50; that the key to a wonderful future was taking stock of the past. Raquel was right. The truth is that experience--learning the hard way--has made me a wiser, and frankly, a better person. As a lawyer, for example, I have found (as I suspect we all have) that success comes from hard work rather than quick fixes; a direct approach is almost always the best approach; and litigation tactics can needlessly squander resources, undermine reputations, and take an advocate's eye off the ball. The lessons go on and on.

While I hope I have grown from 50 years of a myriad of mistakes, I have wondered if the same can be said for the Bar. How could it? The Bar is actually an organization of 66,000+ attorneys with an equal number of approaches to lawyering. New lawyers being sworn in do not instantly acquire the wisdom of those who came before them; there are no universal folk tales passed down with the oath.

On the other hand, we do have an institutional history and we present it to you here. In this issue you will see thin ties, short hair, and too few women and minorities. But you will also see advocates that resolved cases on a handshake and whose word meant more than any written agreement; lawyers who know the difference between technological advances and professional growth, who understand that while we can fax, Fed-Ex, and e-mail faster than ever before, there are not enough bytes in the world to replace human contact.

Although we may never return to these admittedly romanticized years, we must seize the opportunity to learn from them and endeavor to instill "old" values in new lawyers. While the professionalism movement is an excellent start, being a role model--like the people in this issue--is even better.

This year, in order to appreciate our history, your Bar staff and volunteers from many local bars and the Board of Governors have worked hard to document and preserve our history and to make this a special year in the life of The Florida Bar. Through our oral history project we have captured the faces, voices, memories, and insights of our past Bar leaders; through the celebration of the first 150 women lawyers we have resurrected the spirit of the women pioneers who opened the door to the legal profession to generations of women who followed; and through this issue we have documented our first half-century of service to the people of Florida. So, when we celebrate our centennial 50 years from now, there will be a record of these "dark ages," for lawyers for whom the term "cell phone" will no doubt seem as dated as "carbon paper" does today.

In brainstorming this issue with the editorial staff, I asked that we try to paint a comprehensive picture of the genesis and progress of our professional organization. Our Bar News reporters conducted dozens of interviews and dug through mountains of archival materials to develop a reasonably complete picture of how a handful of progressive lawyers persuaded a forward-thinking Supreme Court that by harnessing the full energy of the bar we could enhance our legal process, better regulate our professional ranks, and better serve the public.

We have included in this issue the Supreme Court's opinion unifying all Florida lawyers into The Florida Bar to give some historical perspective on the thinking of those, since departed, who brought the petition before the court.

Gary Blankenship, our senior writer for the News, did a marvelous job of tracing our history from the days of our first executive director and membership secretary operating out of one small office in the court's basement to our present full-service association. Today, the Bar combines a model regulatory agency and professional organization offering continuing education, practice support, publications, administrative support to scores of service committees, and many other services designed to help today's practicing lawyer meet the demands and needs of clients and the courts.

This issue further examines the issues our profession has dealt with in terms of its explosive growth, the assimilation of a growing percentage of women and minorities into its ranks, and increasingly rapid technological changes. We have also threaded throughout the package photos from the Bar's archives, just for fun--I suspect many in our membership today cannot recall a time when men all sported crewcuts and women wore gloves and pillboxes! I am confident that you will enjoy this unique view of our professional past.

After Raquel prompted me to survey my past, I vowed that I would do so every year, not just to gauge how I had grown, but to remember (and hopefully recapture) what I had lost along the way. As a Bar that has grown in many respects, but strayed in some others, we must use this opportunity to do the same. When I turned 50, I realized that wonderful years lie ahead. If we take stock of our collective history, the Bar will be able to make the same claim.