What I've done

Voters for ABA officers on the Nominating Committee use different criteria to decide how to cast their votes.

Those criteria reflect the diversity of their personal, professional, and ABA experiences. That diversity is one of the ABA’s great strengths.

Many start with a candidate’s resume – that laundry list of posts a candidate has held, in the ABA and elsewhere. Those laundry lists are interesting, and maybe even informative – at least about where a candidate has chosen to spend their time. But they're at best a starting point.?

Candidates for ABA office should be judged based on what they’ve actually accomplished, in those posts listed on their bar resumes and otherwise. In questions of leadership, past performance is a pretty good indicator of future results.

Leadership means seeking and taking on positions because you want to?do?something, not to?be something. That’s why I have sought and taken on the positions on my resume, and that’s why I want to be ABA President.

Months ago, I shared my?bar resume.?Here, to help ABA Nominating Committee voters with some of their due diligence, I shamelessly offer some of the backstory on positions on my laundry list, including real accomplishments.

The TBA YLD

I started my bar work – I consciously use the word “work” – in the Tennessee Bar Association Young Lawyers Division.

I became active within a month of beginning my practice in 1986, and eventually became TBA YLD President in 1994-95. But years before becoming President, by 1990, I had launched my first significant bar project – the creation and publication of the?Tennessee Ethics Handbook.

In those pre-Internet days, copies of the several hundred Tennessee Formal Ethics Opinions providing ethics guidance to Tennessee lawyers were scarce commodities, available only in one hard copy in each of three law libraries across Tennessee. I saw a need and a platform in the TBA YLD to address it. I edited and published the?Tennessee Ethics Handbook,?which provided those hard-to-find Formal Ethics Opinions in paperback form, with an index and finding aids not available before. The?Handbook?went through four editions and brought needed ethics guidance to thousands of lawyers all over Tennessee. The TBA YLD gave me the platform to accomplish that.?

A few years later, still pre-Internet, I used that same TBA YLD platform to collect, edit, and publish the local rules of all 31 Tennessee judicial districts, each of which included a number of different courts. Before this, no one (including the courts) had published these in one place. This publication made practice easier for Tennessee trial lawyers.

In 1992, still before serving as TBA YLD President, I conceived and convinced the TBA – not its YLD – to establish the TBA Commission on Women and Minorities in the Profession, following the lead of ABA and other state bar efforts. Tennessee had never seen this kind of effort before. It ran for five years; I was a member; and we did ground-breaking work. That work led directly to our Supreme Court establishing a very similar effort of its own that took over and continued the work.

TBA work

Years later, in 2017-18, I served as President of the Tennessee Bar Association.

The TBA is one of the most successful voluntary bars in the country. Our 13,000 or so members make up about 72% of practicing Tennessee lawyers. That’s the highest market share in the Southern Conference of Bar Presidents. Through my year and going into the pandemic, our member numbers were stable or grew every year for some time, all the way back through the Great Recession. The same was true of our revenue.

By far the most important accomplishment of my tenure as TBA President was that I helped lead the TBA through a significant leadership transition.

Over a number of months leading to “my” year, and working closely with the lawyer who immediately preceded me as President, we led the challenging process of transitioning from our 20-year veteran executive director to an executive director for a new generation – a brilliant African-American woman, Joycelyn Stevenson. She was not from the bar executive community; instead, she was a practicing lawyer and shareholder at Littler Mendelson in Nashville. She started with us about two weeks after I became President.

Well before my year started, I realized that the single most important thing I could do as President was to enable her transition from law firm partner to active bar executive. So my No. 1 goal as President was to support her in every way possible in her first year, and I set aside any major “presidential initiatives.” Thanks entirely to her efforts, she has been wonderful. Others apparently think so, too: she was just elected, just 3 years after she started with the TBA, to be the 2023-24 President of the National Association of Bar Executives.

Despite my focus on supporting Joycelyn’s inaugural year, there were a few other accomplishments during my TBA Presidential year. Our number one legislative and policy priority was to support our Supreme Court’s efforts to dramatically increase the funding for appointed counsel for criminal defendants, including juveniles, and for parents whose parental rights were threatened with termination. We worked hand-in-glove with the Court to press for these new funds with the Governor and in the legislature. In the end, we helped the Court get $9.7 million in new, annual, long-term state funding for appointed counsel. It was a historic win for the justice system, lawyers, and Tennesseans in trouble who need effective counsel.

We also invested time and energy in growing long-term support for the justice system in Tennessee political leadership. In response to the deep concern of TBA leaders about the declining number of Tennessee lawyer-legislators, I used my platform as TBA President to create the Tennessee Public Service Academy, a leadership program I envisioned to encourage and train lawyers – especially young and diverse lawyers – to run for local office, like town council and school board, to feed the pipeline to the legislature. That program is still going strong and the TBA is committed to it for the long term.

SCBP

While I was TBA President, I was also elected President of the 17-state Southern Conference of Bar Presidents in 2017-18. The TBA organized and hosted bar leaders from all over the region in (of course) Memphis. I am very proud of what we accomplished for the bar presidents, including programming at the inspiring National Civil Rights Museum on police-involved shootings and efforts to remove Confederate-themed monuments. And of course, there was amazing programming at Graceland on Memphis music and on Elvis and the law (no kidding).

ABA and TBA ethics work

My resume reports that I was a member of the ABA Ethics 2000 Commission for five years. I was one of 13 ethics lawyers (the youngest member by far) who actively participated in thoroughly revising the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. We all did real work. I worked on the substance of the Rules, but also on advocacy for our revisions. I was one of the floor managers who successfully led our efforts, over two different House sessions, to get House of Delegates approval. (By that time, I had been in the ABA House for more than 10 years.) The work of Ethics 2000 was a triumph; every state in the country has now adopted a version of those Rules. I played a part in that work.

I played a similar role in the Tennessee ethics arena. On my resume, you will see that I led the Tennessee Bar Association’s Ethics Committee for a decade. Under my leadership, our Committee led the TBA in the effort to convince our Supreme Court to replace our creaky 30-year-old ethics rules with a fully updated version of the ABA Model Rules. After overseeing the drafting of our proposed rules and obtaining TBA support for them, I drafted our TBA petition to the Supreme Court. I also organized and participated the TBA team that made the oral argument in favor of adoption before our Supreme Court. Our accomplishment was the successful adoption of the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct.

ABA leadership in the 1990s

You already know that the ABA laundry list items on my resume are robust.

Among them, I served on the Board of Governors in the 1990s as a YLD representative. It was truly remarkable experience for a 34-year-old lawyer, then an associate in my law firm. The experience was amazing, not only for the mere fact of being there, but for the work on which I helped that early in my career. I served on the Finance Committee all three years. My first assignment was to work with the?ABA Journal?editorial board to successfully revamp a part of its financial relationship with the Board that allowed them significantly more budget flexibility.

My years on the Board also coincided with the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation of ABA law school accreditation. Being on the board of an organization under federal investigation for antitrust violations was challenging. Throughout that experience, I was one of the three members of the Board’s Accreditation Committee, led by the late Roy Hammer, which led the Board through these very fraught issues. That lengthy investigation was eventually settled with a 10-year federal consent decree. The entire experience was a watershed in the ABA’s decades-long national leadership role in law school accreditation. Quite literally, the ABA was forced to decide whether we wanted to continue one of the ABA’s oldest and most important missions – law school accreditation. As the investigation and our discussions progressed, it was by no means clear that there was a consensus on this important question. After much deliberation, we decided as a Board that we did. What we on the Board accomplished: we preserved, renewed, and strengthened the ABA’s commitment to and its central role in American law school accreditation.

My third year on the Board from the YLD – at 36 – I was appointed Chair of the Finance Committee (and member of the Executive Committee) by President Lee Cooper. I was the first YLD representative ever to serve in that role. An honor, but hard work, including overseeing the Association’s budget process. For the last half of that year, in addition to our regular budget work, our Committee embarked on a focused campaign to better educate the entire Board on the ABA’s finances. Much later, Finance staff later told me that, for a number of years afterward, the Finance Committee and the Board used that 1997 “white paper” that I and our Finance Committee drafted to educate the Board on how our finances worked.

Recent ABA leadership

More than a decade after my first Board service I returned, serving as ABA Treasurer, placing me back on the Board and the Executive Committee for another four years. I note a couple of accomplishments.

One primary focus as Treasurer was to rebuild a broken relationship between the Sections on the one hand – especially their budget and revenue officers – and the Finance Committee and the ABA Financial Services Group, on the other hand. We worked very hard – and successfully – on communication. We – especially the Finance staff, me, and leaders of the section budget officers group – built new, more helpful reports, and made them more timely, reliable, and informative. Working with the Investments Subcommittee, we responded to Section issues. We provided Sections, Divisions, and Forums more investment options and easier, more direct access to implement those options themselves, plus access to direct advice from our investment advisors. Those investment tools are still in heavy use today. Our accomplishment: better relations and better communications about financial matters among the Board, the Finance Committee, Financial Services, and the Sections, Divisions, and Forums, and a stronger perception by the Sections, Divisions, and Forums that their voices were heard.

In my last years as Treasurer, I led a group of Board members and officers who determined that the continued decline in dues was reaching a crisis point. We convened a Pricing Strategy Advisory Group, with representatives from across the ABA. From those deliberations and deep consultations with the Sections, Divisions, and Forums, we took a proposal to the House for a modest dues increase. We built an Association-wide consensus that this was the “least bad” option for the ABA at that time. I led the debate that led to a broad House consensus. Through that thoughtful, open, and inclusive process, we came to grips, for at least a time, with dues revenue performance.

Throughout my term, I took very seriously the communications responsibility of the Treasurer. With the critical help of our great CFO Bill Phelan and his staff, I delivered the good and bad news, accurately and in full context, to the Finance Committee, the Board, the House, the Sections, and others. I firmly believe that several years of clear and accurate communication was key to the House comfortably adopting the Pricing Strategy Advisory Group’s recommendations.

Leadership directly facing challenges

Perhaps I should amend my premise here – that what matters is not occupying a position on a bar resume, but what is accomplished in that position – to recognize that ABA voters should consider a candidate’s willingness to take on tough fights that matter, regardless of the outcome. After all, strong leadership demands a willingness to fight and fail, when the fight matters. I’ve had my share of those experiences. They never fit nicely on a bar resume, and few candidates include them.

As a member of the Ethics 2000 Commission, we proposed to the House of Delegates an ethics rule permitting the screening of laterally-moving lawyers to avoid disqualification. After vigorous debate, the House rejected it.

Almost a decade later, the ABA Ethics Committee returned to this fight, with a fresh proposal to include screening in the ABA Model Rules. Then-Chair of the Ethics Committee Steve Krane sought my assistance in getting this proposal through the House, though I was not a member of his Committee. In 2009, I helped lead the Ethics Committee’s successful effort to include screening in ABA Model Rule 1.10.

Over the same period, in Tennessee, I worked with our TBA Ethics Committee to get screening for laterally-moving lawyers added to the Tennessee ethics rules by our Supreme Court. We tried several times, including in oral argument directly to the Court (which I personally made), but our Court insisted on reaching a different policy decision. Acknowledging the Court’s ultimate decision-making authority, our Committee nevertheless proposed to our Court good, well-drafted language that accomplished the result they intended, despite our opposition to that result. We felt very strongly that it was vital to the profession and the public to have a well-drafted rule, even if we disliked its substance. The Court appeared grateful, and adopted our proposed language. That language remains the law today, many years later, having brought clarity and predictability to our law of screening. Sometimes, good leadership requires recognizing “defeat” and doing what good can be done.

My bar resume also nowhere mentions that I successfully led the political effort for the ABA Ethics Committee to gain House adoption of the ABA’s anti-discrimination rule in August 2016. The Committee, then ably led then by Prof. Myles Lynk, produced a really well-drafted lawyer discipline rule barring harassment and discrimination by lawyers – now ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(g). The Committee asked me to floor-manage the proposal, though again, I was not a member of the Committee. After a tremendous effort by the Committee and?many?allies from all over the ABA, the proposal was adopted by the ABA House, and adopted?overwhelmingly. That Rule continues today to be the central focus of an important debate in many jurisdictions over the bar’s proper response to discrimination and bias in our profession. I’m proud of the part I played in making that happen and driving the current national debate on proper standards of conduct for our profession.

After we got the House to adopt ABA Rule 8.4(g), because I was then soon to be TBA President, I brought home that new, well-drafted anti-discrimination rule and tried my best to get it adopted in Tennessee. I failed.

In my first board meeting as TBA President, after vigorous debate, our board strongly approved a petition to our Supreme Court seeking adoption of the Rule. A few years before, Tennessee’s lawyer disciplinary board, an arm of our Supreme Court, had tried and failed to convince our Court to adopt just this kind of rule. (The TBA actually opposed this earlier proposal before our Court, but that earlier proposal was a poorly-drafted rule, not current ABA Rule 8.4(g).)?

Knowing our disciplinary board’s desire for a rule, and with the TBA’s approval in hand, I convinced our disciplinary board to join with the TBA to?jointly?propose a version of the ABA rule to our Tennessee Supreme Court. In decades of the regular involvement of our lawyer disciplinary board and the TBA in ethics rulemaking, we had never joined in a petition to the Court. We both thought it would make a difference in the Court’s reaction. We pushed it hard, but we ran into fierce opposition, and our Court turned us down. But we tried our best. We thought it mattered, and I still do. I regret nothing about that effort.

Doing the work needed

As I have told many thus far during my campaign for ABA President, I’m running for President to?do?the work, because we?need?a President to do that work to protect and advance the ABA’s mission. I’m running because I sense the same challenges ahead that you do, and because I believe my skills and experience – my prior and current work towards tangible accomplishments – are uniquely suited to those challenges.

Of course, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me hear from you.

I ask for your support to allow me to do the work we need done by our ABA President.

Lucian Pera

[email protected] ?? Office: 901-524-5278 ? Cell: 901-606-4948

Memphis, August 8, 2021

Lucian is a Memphis partner in the law firm of Adams and Reese LLP. He is currently a candidate for President-Elect of the American Bar Association.