‘Tennessee Bar Journal’ Celebrates 50 Years All Year Long

This issue begins the 50th year of publication for the Tennessee Bar Journal, the 350th issue printed since the presses first rolled in 1965. (Do not attempt to do the math; before it went monthly in 1999, there were some years with six issues, others with four. You will need to just trust us on this number.)

When we celebrated the Journal’s 30th birthday in 1995 one of the big stories was about the advances in production. In the early days, each Journal started its life on a typewriter and involved lots of people doing manual production. But by 1995 we were using the modern miracle of a desktop computer and disks to receive articles. We also had this amazing machine that transmitted information from one place to another — and it looked exactly the same when it printed out at its destination! You might recall the wonder that was the fax machine.

On the Journal’s 40th birthday in 2005, production was not as much the innovation, but in our retrospective that year, we learned about the advertisements from 1965, the points of history the Journal had covered over the years, and lots of other 60s-era law-related information. There were even letters from Gov. Frank G. Clement and Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice Hamilton S. Burnett. Take a look — it’s a great stroll down memory lane.[1]

One key piece of that history: The TBA Board of Governors’ vote in November 1964 to create the Journal and Publications Committee, the purpose of which would be “to bring to the lawyers of Tennessee articles and studies of value in their legal practice and their improvement of the profession.”

Robert Kirk Walker of Chattanooga was Tennessee Bar Association president-elect when the Journal was conceived. “At the time, I knew it would be a good communicative tool and am impressed that the Tennessee Bar Journal has come into its own,” Walker told the Journal in 2004.

Being instrumental in the magazine’s beginnings makes him proud, he said, especially that it has been “embraced, refined and improved upon” by TBA staff and contributors over the years.

“We felt that the Tennessee Lawyer [a quarterly TBA newsletter that went to members] was an inadequate publication for us,” Walker said. “The Journal provides an opportunity for lawyers who are experts in certain fields to share their expertise with others.”

Throughout that 40th Birthday year we looked back at ways the Journal covered advocacy, changes in the Young Lawyers Division, convention coverage, the changing role of women and minorities, the advent of mandatory continuing legal education and more. At that time I invited all of you — more than 11,000 lawyers — to my office to see the bound versions of these old treasures. It is both heartwarming and hilarious to see what the practice of law was like 50 years ago and we didn’t want you to miss it.

I wrote: “I want you to see it all: the early Caribbean cruises offered by the TBA where men wore suits and ties on deck and their wives were only known as Mrs. Somebody Else; the Economic Survey of 1966 where it was reported that Tennessee lawyers’ median income was $16,000; my sweet Golden Retriever who posed for a cover story called ‘There’s no such thing as a free bite,’ which generated letters in defense of a breed that of course would never bite anyone anyway; and pictures of many of you senior lawyers when you were young lawyers, right out of school.”

Each month of 2015 we will take a look at those “golden years” and how things may or may not have changed. In this first issue, we look at the drastic attitude shift that has taken place on the subject of and support for legal services and pro bono legal work. My office is small for all of you to visit at once, but do drop by when you’re at the Tennessee Bar Center and look through the pages of this five-decade-long history project.

PRO BONO: Then and Now

Lawyers giving of their time is as old as the profession itself, but the concept of pro bono — especially in an organized or accountable way — was not mentioned specifically in print in the Journal until 1989 when Don Paine gave tips on what discovery tools were available when representing clients pro bono. From there the concept took off when in 1991 President Ron Gilman wrote about a trend toward mandatory pro bono (warning against this possibility), followed by President Tom Binkley, who wrote about the five pro bono cases he had handled that year.

“I know, as you know, that the time you spend doing pro bono work will take away from time for which you could be billing,” Binkley wrote. “However, the difference you can make in someone’s life may have a bigger impact than you will ever know. I personally participate in pro bono because I believe I owe it to my profession and the community. I trust you feel the same.”

That year, the TBA formed its Pro Bono Committee to “evaluate the pro bono situation in Tennessee.” In 1992 the Journal told the stories of the TBA’s first Access to Justice Award honorees and has been doing so every year since. In 1995, President Harris Gilbert urged members to save the Legal Services Corporation — it wasn’t long after that the TBA’s pro bono award was named for him. Nearly every president since has also urged lawyers to do pro bono work.

In 2003, the committee, now known as Access to Justice, encouraged and partnered with the Journal to start a tradition that continues today, in this magazine you are now reading. Each January (except for the one year it was February) the committee spearheads this issue with the ATJ emphasis, focusing on different major topics of each year. Issues have included the crisis in Legal Aid; firms adopting pro bono policies; migrant farm workers’ legal rights; help for self-represented litigants; the International Justice Mission; programs for immigrants; the Supreme Court making ATJ its “number one strategic priority”; how new media and other tools are helping connect people with legal services, including the advent of OnlineTNJustice.org; easy ways to work pro bono into your busy practice; and this year, Medical-Legal Partnerships.

When in 2008, George T. “Buck” Lewis became president, he made access to justice the main focus of his year in office, starting a year-long campaign called 4 ALL, a multi-faceted effort to enhance access to justice for Tennesseans who cannot afford legal representation.[2]

The 4 ALL campaign was designed to educate the legal profession and the public on the urgent need to find new ways for lawyers to participate in pro bono service. The initiative involved collaborations with local and county bar organizations and the Tennessee Supreme Court in studying access to justice issues and searching for legislative initiatives to increase access to justice for the poor.

In his first president’s column Lewis wrote:

I ask that you lock arms with me to aggressively attack a problem that is growing worse by the day despite our constant efforts. That problem is the denial of access to justice caused by poverty, domestic violence, our deteriorating economy, and the ever-increasing cost of legal services. …

Who are these people? Well, they are our brothers and sisters. They go to our churches. They clean up our offices at night. They work in the hotels where we convene. They look after our children when we travel. They mow our lawns, paint our houses, and fix the roofs over our heads. They type up the transcripts of our depositions as a second job. They answer the phone all day long for minimum wage at some of Tennessee's biggest companies. Many are servicemen and women who serve our country but can't afford to hire a lawyer to write their will or deal with their landlord.

These Tennesseans struggle every day to make it, and there but for the grace of God and our opportunity to get a legal education, go every single one of us.[3]

That first public service day in April 2009 generated “the largest number of lawyers providing free legal assistance on one day in Tennessee history.”

But the tide has not always flowed this direction. In the August 1965 Journal, Executive Director Billie Bethel and President Walker write at length about the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA), following their return from the National Conference on Law and Poverty. At this meeting of “some 550 lawyers, law school professors, social workers and representatives of the Office of Economic Opportunity convened to discuss the problems of the extension of legal services to the poor” under the EOA program, part of former President Dwight Eisenhower’s “War on Poverty.” In sum, the article, “Et Tu, Brute!” suggested that the ideas put forth at the meeting “proved astonishing as well as greatly alarming to many of those present.”

The program advocated … is one of offering federal funds for the purpose of establishing ‘neighborhood law centers.’ The ‘center’ would be located in ‘poverty’ neighborhoods and a ‘poor’ person could walk in and seek legal advice from lawyers — or others. … In other words, the program is one which provides competition for the independent practicing lawyer, the competition acting in flagrant violation of the Canons of Ethics of the legal profession … and all supported by the taxpayers.[4]

The article says that “philosophies which would socialize the practice of law – philosophies which would place the legal profession and the social worker on a common level as member of the so called ‘helping professions,’ dedicated toward leading the ‘poor’ individual … toward a life found acceptable in all aspects to the battery of ‘socio-economic oriented do-gooders’ assigned to investigate, watch and direct him, ignoring in toto, the wishes of the individual.”

The question, the article continues, “is not one of whether or not we are willing to take still another major step deeper into socialism. Independence of the legal profession cannot survive the program!!”

Now, five decades later, the Journal continues to chronicle the many changes and developments in the legal profession and community, including innovative and somewhat unexpected partnerships. From members of the private bar working to increase support for legal aid organizations, via financial resources and volunteer efforts, to doctors and lawyers joining forces to share expertise, this magazine has been there to reflect the growth of commitment that lawyers increasingly have to ensure that Tennessee’s most vulnerable citizens have representation and full access to our system of justice.

Notes

1. “Happy Birthday, TBJ!” January 2005 Tenn. Bar Journal at https://www.tba.org/sites/default/files/journal_archives/2005/TBJ0105.pdf.
2. “TBA Asks Court to Make Free Legal Help More Accessible,” Tennessee Bar Association press release, Nov. 20, 2008, https://www.tba.org/press-release/tba-asks-court-to-make-free-legal-help-more-accessible.
3. “Leave a Proud, Enduring Legacy,” by Buck Lewis, July 2008 Tenn. Bar Journal, p. 3.
4. “Et Tu, Brute!” by Billie Bethel and Robert Kirk Walker, Tenn. Bar Journal, August 1965, p. 11. Download a pdf at https://www.tba.org/sites/default/files/pro_bono1965.pdf.

Suzanne Craig Robertson is editor of the Tennessee Bar Journal.