From the President - June 2023

Thank you Judge Minihan for administering the oath to our new slate of leaders, and thank you Judge Jamieson for such a beautiful and humbling introduction. Thank you also to Sean Callagy for your inspiring keynote. It’s an honor to have you here and thank you so much for sharing with us about how we have the power to write our own narrative and flip the script.

I want to start by recognizing my family. I’m deeply grateful for your putting up with me for my whole life, and particularly for being here tonight to celebrate and to support me. My parents Mel and Lynda came up from Florida and were the first to book a table. They’re here with my brothers Neil and Steven, their spouses, David and Olga and my mother-in-law Raphy Haimowitz. It also gives me great joy to introduce you to my daughters Esther and Anna, and to my wife Sarah. You are my reason for being, and an everyday reminder of how beautiful life can be.

I also want to thank the Nominating Committee and the WCBA’s membership for entrusting me with this position. It’s incredibly humbling to be picked for this role. I wouldn’t be ready without the guidance of this Bar’s past leaders who’ve supported me since I became active—Dawn Kirby, Dan Hollis, Kelly Welch, Stephanie Burns, Richard Vecchio, Judge Jamieson, Wendy Weathers, Judge Hyer, and most recently Dolores Gebhardt. I’d also like to recognize our own Sherry Levin Wallach, who has been a great collaborator with us as New York State Bar Association President. I’ve greatly benefited from all of you by your mentorship and I am blessed by your friendship.

Thank you also to our great new slate of officers and directors. I’ve worked with most of you, and I know the skills, passion and dedication you bring to your posts. I want to also congratulate our President-Elect Jim Landau. Every time I’ve turned around to take on a new role, to plan a CLE or to tackle an important project, you’ve been there to collaborate and to support me. I also want to thank my colleagues at Prince Lobel for welcoming me to the fold and supporting the important work we do for the Bar.

And of course, thanks to our Immediate Past President Dolores Gebhardt for such a great year, and particularly for your Stronger Together initiative. Thanks to you, we tightened our collaborations with our County’s affiliate Bars. This initiative will be a standing WCBA project going forward.?

We’ll also be continuing the Public Service Initiative which was launched by Past-President Judge Hyer, and which earned the WCBA the high distinction of being the only mid-sized Bar Association to receive the New York State Bar Association’s Innovation Award for this work.

Our work will also continue in creating opportunities for the next generation of legal professionals and Bar leaders, which includes running the Countywide High School Mock Trial program led by WCBA Board Member Arthur Muller, and the Diversity Committee’s Summer Intern Program, which over the last 15 years has reached over 58 local students from social, cultural, racial or ethnic populations that have been statistically underrepresented in our profession. I want to particularly thank Judge Keri Fiore and Judge Karen Beltran for continuing to advance this and similar initiatives to ensure that our Association is inclusive and truly representative of the people we serve.

So, in the wake of all this great work, what will we add this year to this line of projects aimed at bringing about positive change? For me, it starts with the recognition that the initiatives I just mentioned hinge on one of the core characteristics of our profession—the desire, and the mission to put the needs of others first. It’s an important value. It ensures our clients are well-represented and that justice is served. Hard work and self-sacrifice are part of our DNA as lawyers.

But too often, we overlook the toll this work ethic can take on us personally. Sometimes we’re so focused on helping others that we forget to take the time to nurture our own legitimate personal and emotional needs. Consider this question: If you needed life-saving surgery, what would be your comfort level in knowing the surgeon you have is excellent, but that you’ll be their 5th surgery at the end of a 12-hour day?

Fortunately for many of us, the stakes aren’t always life-or-death, but they are always serious because what we do has deep impacts for our clients. Whether we’re dealing with criminal justice, child custody, or a business litigation where a company’s existence may be at stake, the consequences of our work have dramatic impacts on the lives of the people we serve.

And just like with the most accomplished surgeon, it may not matter how skilled we are if we’re feeling mentally, emotionally and physically drained when it’s time to help our clients. This leads to a fundamental, common-sense proposition—to do a great job of taking care of the needs of others, we need to find better ways to take care of ourselves.

Consider that we’ve all just been through a profound experience of isolation and loss in a global pandemic. Particularly in the earliest days, every one of us had to contend with the possibility that we or a loved one could be lost to a highly contagious, deadly disease. And we had to do this while being separated from each other, having to stay six feet away from those who we were able to see.

While we learned to cope with this new reality, we also learned some important lessons about how we work, and how we prioritize and balance work relative to the time we make for other things that make life complete. This means spending time with loved ones, going to concerts or baseball games, or sometimes just doing nothing and giving ourselves a chance to recharge.

And for many of us in the wake of changing how we work to adapt to the circumstances, we found ourselves asking whether there are ways we can work better and find a little more balance. This led to the WCBA’s formation of the Post-COVID Task Force on Attorney Well Being, whose great work was led by Task Force Co-Chair Brian Cohen and members Brian Belowich, the Honorable Karen Beltran, the Honarable Lissette Fernandez, Rachel Halperin, Lisa Herman, Kapila Juthani, Michele Kern-Rappy, Andrea Loigman, Livia Rodriguez, Natalie Panzera, Michelle Tarson and Russell Yankwitt. Over the past year, we had critical discussions about how we can eliminate unnecessary stressors in our profession.?We also discussed how the surge in technology has changed how we practice— both positively and negatively. We then came up with concrete solutions about how we can achieve better balance in our profession.

This year, my challenge for us is to find ways to be a little better, a little healthier, and to do what we can to eliminate and modify those things about our profession that create unnecessary stress.

So, how do we do this?

First, our Annual Banquet marks the publication of the Task Force’s initial Report and Recommendations. Everyone is invited to review the report and to discuss with each other how we can better ensure our mental and emotional well-being. The Report’s suggestions are not one-size-fits-all. Instead, it offers a menu of ways to improve the practice. You’re free to adopt any of the recommendations, whether individually or on a firm or agency-wide basis, or to come up with your own solutions.

Second, every firm, agency and practice in the County is invited not only to implement recommendations from the report, but to meet internally to discuss what the report doesn’t cover—whatever is unique to your workplace and to your individual work situations that can be adjusted to make the workday better.

Third, I’m asking for input from all stakeholders. I’ve asked all Committee and Section Chairs to include in their planning some discussion devoted to how stresses in that Committee’s particular practice area can be reduced or eliminated. I’ve also asked that each Committee and Section contribute at least one writing on that topic, with the goal of producing a collection of shared experiences and ideas that all of our members can use as a resource.

I’d also like to invite the leaders of every affiliate Bar, as well as our County’s law students and faculty at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace, to encourage their members to participate in the discussion. For that purpose, we have established a WCBA Legal Profession Well-Being Survey on our website where people can submit their own ideas about how to reduce personal stress and change the legal practice for the better, with the option of submissions being anonymous to allow people to be as open as possible.

With these contributions, we can generate a trove of great ideas about how we can live and work better. I believe this exercise will contribute to making us healthier, happier and therefore stronger practitioners for the benefit of ourselves as well as our clients.

Lastly, I invite all of you to join in the continuing work of our now newly minted Attorney Wellness Committee, which will also welcome collaboration and participation from members of our County’s affiliate bars and law students and faculty.

In short, my challenge for us is to improve how we practice and to help each other find a little more balance. Let’s see if we can find ways to be both successful and happy at the same time, and thereby pave the way for a brighter career for the next generation of legal professionals. Thank you, I look forward to working with all of you.