William D. Hyslop
WSBA President
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Listening to Change in the
Legal Profession
In 2013, the Temple of Jus- tice in Olympia turned 100 years old. Home to our State Supreme Court and the State Law Library, the Temple has
been the centerpiece of our state’s
justice system for a long time. In November 2013, I was privileged to join
Justice Debra Stephens in discussing
“100 Years of Civil Litigation” during
a portion of a daylong Centennial Celebration CLE that focused on changes
in the law and our profession. I suggested that each of us can develop our
own short list of changes to the civil
litigation system that have impacted
the hearing of civil disputes, and that
no one’s list is perfect by any means.
From my own set of rose-colored
glasses, some of the changes that have
occurred in civil litigation include the
merger of law and equity, the development of the uniform commercial code
and other uniform acts that recognize
the changing ways of how people live
and do business, the use and effect of
technology in how we practice law, the
proliferation of local rules adopted
by courts in our 39 counties and the
problems that raises for the practitioner, and the fact that many of us
practice law in more than one state or
more than one country as a means of
supporting our clients whose affairs
do not recognize state boundaries in
this global age. In many respects, I discussed how we practice law in addition
to some actual changes in the law.
This past year, the Washington
State Bar Association celebrated its
125th anniversary. The WSBA was
formed by a small group of 35 at-
torneys meeting in Olympia while
waiting for their cases to be called
for hearing before the State Supreme
Court. We have changed dramatically
since then. The ranks of the WSBA
have grown from the original 35 to
more than 38,000 licensed members
today. Somewhere in the neighbor-
hood of 10,000 of those members re-
side out of state and hold licenses to
practice in more than one state.
Closer to home, my mother turned
100 at the end of May. During her
centennial celebration, I found myself
reflecting on some
of the huge changes she has seen
in her lifetime. It
used to take her
parents two days to
drive from Douglas
County in central Washington
(where she grew
up) to Seattle; today it only takes
about 40 minutes
to fly from Spokane to Seattle,
not counting the
time added for the
security lines and
related waiting that causes many of
us to become impatient. Women at
Washington State College (now WSU)
held a student strike in the 1930s
over rules from the dean of women
that included that women could not
wear red dresses (and certainly not
pants), something thought to be inappropriate at the time. We find this
to be absurd today, particularly as we
celebrate equality and diversity, but
nonetheless that was the state of social affairs at the time.
As a member of the Greatest Gen-
eration, my mother saw first hand the
long ordeals of the Great
Depression and World
War II, along with the national sacri-
fices involved with both. She watched
the news as John Glenn circled the
globe three times and Neil Armstrong
became the first to step onto the moon;
today we are looking at whether there
is life on Mars! And she saw the inven-
tion of computers and the develop-
ment of the tech-
nology age that
has transformed
our lives in
ever-expanding
ways. There are
countless other
examples.
Is the legal
profession keeping up with the
changes in today’s world? Are
we forging our
own future as a
profession? Are
we adapting to
changes occurring in society’s
need for law and
justice today? These are just some of
the questions that the Board of Governors and WSBA staff are focused
on as we work to serve the public
and equip our members for a changing profession. What we know at the
outset of this inquiry is that the legal
profession in the state of Washington
is, and must be, changing to meet our
clients’ needs. We are a consumer-driven and client-driven profession.
Those we serve with professional legal services will dictate how the legal
profession changes with the times to
serve our clients more so than how we
