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It’s a question that I began asking myself about the Austin Bar before my presidential term began. Like many local bar organizations, we have wrestled with issues concerning membership and the recent headwinds that a global pandemic generously provided. Nonetheless, even as we have successfully navigated these challenges, the State Bar’s Local Bar Leaders Conference really made me start to question if the Austin Bar will continue to exist in the future in a way that it has historically. As conference attendees, we reviewed statistics concerning a relatively precipitous decline in bar membership after Generation X. The decline becomes even more pronounced as the statistics begin reflecting bar membership among the younger generations. Because the Austin Bar primarily relies on dues to fund its operations, these statistics made me start considering what we need to do to ensure the Austin Bar Association’s long-term survival. It also made me wonder what bar associations will look like in the future.
In my mind, the Austin Bar should continue to exist as we currently know it because membership and participation offer benefits to all practicing attorneys. Those who join and participate develop relationships with attorneys practicing in different areas of the law. These relationships help bolster networks, provide contacts to utilize when facing questions outside our professional wheelhouses, and lead to career-long mentoring relationships. They can further lead to friendships, referrals, and other personal/career benefits. Joining and participating also allows attorneys to hone their leadership and interpersonal skills. Moreover, joining and participating allow attorneys to serve, help others, and give back to the profession. These benefits would seem to be relatively universal with some degree of difference depending on where an attorney works. For instance, a government lawyer might never have the need to generate business in the same way as their counterparts in private practice. Nevertheless, the benefits of bar membership would seem to equally apply to those comprising the younger generations (or even more so because they are closer to their career’s inception than to its end).
But I don’t know everything. And when making decisions or planning for the future, it’s beneficial to collect as much relevant information as possible and employ it. To that end, we’ve created a Membership Committee this term that contains a subcommittee that will collect data to help guide our planning. Under the able leadership of Will Hailey, this subcommittee (or “think tank,” as I’ve dubbed it) is constructing itself and helping the bar gain insight that will guide our future planning. If you like building organizations and are interested in collecting the data that we need to plan, please contact me (president@austinbar.com) or Will (will.hailey@txcourts.gov). We’d love to have you assist us in what may constitute our most important work over this bar year.
Although I don’t know what the collected information will reveal, when discussing these issues with Lily (my insightful, non-attorney, teenaged daughter), she suggested that we create content for TikTok and maintain an active YouTube channel. We’ll see if she’s right.