“When somebody says it’s not about the money — it’s about the money.” - H.L. Mencken
This Friday, the State Bar of Arizona considers whether or not to ask the state supreme court to approve a precertification system for organizations offering continuing legal education (CLE) in Arizona.
Those favoring a first-ever pay-to-play arrangement wherein CLE providers have to pay a fee to be Bar-accredited to sell credit-eligible courses in Arizona are making like it’s all good. They’re saying it’s about insuring program quality and attorney competency; enhancing member services; and advancing the Bar’s mission to protect the public — from its lawyers.
But recalling Mencken and as every lawyer who’s ever heard clients say ‘it’s not about the money’ knows — the proposed change is about the money. And we’re talking about a lot — well into the 7 figures of gross revenue, at least here in Arizona. For mandatory and voluntary bars across the country, continuing legal education is a cash cow business.
► Generating more money via another CLE revenue stream and by;
► Protecting its $2M+ annual CLE revenue turf from increased competition from third-party CLE providers.
How high the annual or course-by-course certification fees will be is anybody’s guess. However, the Bar subcommittee recommending the changes noted that other state bars have annual fees ranging “from $100-$500.” Unfortunately, the subcommittee neglected to similarly emphasize that the mandatory continuing legal education jurisdictions of Nevada, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana, and New York have CLE certification guidelines but without fee generating mechanisms. See http://www.barancle.com/mcle/course-application-requirements/
Those aforementioned states, which include both mandatory and voluntary bars, only require lawyers to comply with MCLE — but do not impose accreditation fees on providers. See https://www.reqwiredlegal.com/reqwired/resources/ and http://www.barancle.com/mcle/mcle-requirement/ And why not mention that the jurisdictions of Michigan, South Dakota, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Massachusetts have no MCLE requirements at all?
To be fair, there’s talk here of possible exemptions for non-profits and local organizations that do not charge dues and seminar registration fees, which must mean that unlike the non-profit Arizona Bar — such organizations have to undertake CLE strictly as a labor of love.
Sarcasm aside, it presumably means law firms with free in-house employee CLE would get a pass. Yet undetermined, though, is whether state agencies or state-funded organizations would be charged fees or reduced fees and whether or not Arizona lawyers would be charged to get credit approval for non-Bar accredited third-party CLE.
Another under-publicized Bar vote.
But for a belated blast email asking for member comments 9 days before the vote, Arizona’s lawyers might not have heard of the significant changes planned. That said, since lawyers are often too busy to pay attention to every email in a glutted inbox, I suspect very few of Arizona’s 17,300 active members will have heard of the proposal. They’ll find out only after the proverbial die’s been cast.
Seems the Bar learned nothing from the brouhaha it stirred when it tried last December 2013 to pass a 22% lawyer licensing fee increase when they thought no one was looking. Because of lawyer objections concerning insufficient due process and lack of transparency, the Bar had to table that vote. Unfortunately, despite subsequent revelations of bureaucratic bloat and budgetary waste, the Bar eventually eked out a 12-11 vote to hike Arizona lawyer dues albeit by ‘only’ 13% instead of 22%.
So no surprise to jaded Bar members about this latest under-publicized move by the ‘friendly state bar.’ Stoically resigned Arizona lawyers already know that despite an almost $15M annual budget; a just-passed dues increase; and a projected nearly $4M surplus by 2019, Bar leadership has sufficient brass to ask members to sustain one more financial burden on their practices. The imposition of new cost-of-business fees on third-party CLE providers will be passed on to participants.
The emperor has no clothes.
The irony of all of this is that from the first imposition of mandatory continuing legal education, lawyers have questioned the faulty assumptions and false conclusions underpinning it.
Indeed, as prominent Nevada family law attorney Marshal Willick writes in his brilliant post “Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Cheap & Useful CLE,” “All studies known to date show no benefit whatsoever to imposition of mandatory CLE programs in terms of lawyer competency. What we have is a time-and-money-consuming bureaucracy that falsely portrays itself as providing a service important to the public, but actually does not make lawyers any better, or provide the public any useful information; in short, it does no actual good.
“Why would the organized Bar – formed for the stated purpose of serving the Bar and public – demonstrate such gross incapacity to see that the emperor has no clothes? Because, even beyond the PR value of the appearance of doing something valuable, there’s money to be made.”
And for additional perspectives concerning the absence of studies that mandatory CLE verifiably improves the quality of legal services or ensures the competency of lawyers, also see, e.g., “The MCLE Question No One Wants to Ask” at http://www.law21.ca/2013/04/the-mcle-question-no-one-wants-to-ask/ and “Colossal Cave-in: Why Reform of MCLE Was DOA” at https://www.myazbar.org/AZAttorney/PDF_Articles/AZAT0201-MCLE.pdf and “Revisiting MCLE: Is Compulsory Passive Learning Building Better Lawyers?” at http://bit.ly/1uRNLDq R
Irksomely, however, mandatory CLE will continue to exist because state bars make a lot of money from it.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” – Thomas Sowell
The creation of yet another bureaucratic department at the Bar staffed with either more clerical or legal staff to vet CLE programs is a fiscal step in the wrong direction.
Among similarly-sized state bars, the Arizona Bar already has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest lawyer licensing fees; one of the largest annual budgets; and one of the biggest administrative staffs and exceptionally well-paid executive cadre in the country.
Instead of looking at fiscal discipline and cost-controls, this latest initiative virtually assures more member dues increases to satisfy the ongoing demands of the new bureaucracy created to qualify, certify, track and audit CLE providers in the future.
Whether there’s enough fiscal good sense left among the Bar’s Board of Governors to stop the proposal remains to be seen.
But when you’re talking Bar bovine bankrolling protection — don’t bet on it.
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Photo Credits: Deadly sins, Avarice, by Jesus Solana at Flickr Creative Commons-requiring attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasotraspaso/6953271968/; The Emperor’s Clothes by Vilhelm Pedersen at Wikipedia Commons, public domain; Revenue by Simon Cunningham at Flickr via Creative Commons license requiring attribution; Limbo Dancer by at Wikipedia Commons under the GNU Free Documentation License; Imag0361, by Bruce Biles at Flickr via Creative Commons license requiring attribution; Money, by Philip Taylor at Flickr via Creative Commons license requiring attribution; Bureaucrats, by at Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; Cash cow, adopted from watchingfrogsboil at Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
