Now that the contract, otherwise known in bureaucraticspeak as the "Memorandum of Understanding" or "M.O.U.," has been finalized to provide indigent criminal defense services to the County, the Sacramento County Bar Association Bar Council can get back to the business of managing the Association for the benefit of all of its members. I don't begrudge all of the time and effort spent by past presidents on renegotiating the contract. Moreover, I think the underpaid, overworked men and women on the Indigent Defense Panel, who serve as contract public defenders deserve all the help and support we can give them. But now it's time to turn the page and move on. Yet, what we learned during the past two years is that the time to start planning for the renegotiation of a contract is as soon as the last negotiation is completed.

Last September at the State Bar Convention in San Diego, I attended something called a "Bar Leaders' Conference." I figured since I was going to be a 'bar leader' soon, I might want to find out what this bar leader business was all about. As it turned out, the conference was not so much about us, the presumptive bar Presidents, but about our boards or "councils," as we refer to it in Sacramento. More specifically, it was about how to best structure, organize and operate these boards in order to serve the needs of the members.

What I liked most about the conference was that I was learning how to be a board member. The assumption is that being a board member requires no formal training. All you have to do to is show up and vote. And to a large extent that is what we do; and to a large extent what we do may be off the mark. Of course, there are always those who go above and beyond the call of duty and volunteer for countless committees or events, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the board functioning as a whole, having a purpose, a direction and a vision for what it wants the Association to be in 5, 10 or even 15 years down the road. To assist us in doing just this, we have decided to hire a consultant.

The M.O.U. is a perfect case in point. While I think the County had a clear idea of what it wanted and how to get there, I'm not so sure that the SCBA Council did. From my vantage point, it appeared we were negotiating the County's agenda rather than our own largely because we had no agenda. Frankly, the issue of how to fairly and competently provide indigent criminal defense services to the County is an exceedingly complicated question. It takes an incredible amount of time and energy to do the things you need to do to fully understand the issues and to be able to separate the doable from the undoable; the possible from the impossible. In a word, it takes planning which is something I aim to focus on as President of the Sacramento County Bar Association.

So this year we have retained the services of a consultant to help us become better council members, to help us better understand our roles, and how to better serve the people to whom we are accountable. Hopefully, the consultant will help us plan for the future and make the future brighter for everyone in the Sacramento County Bar Association, including IDP.

March / April 2006