For the past two years I have had the great honor and privilege of serving on the national Board of Directors of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. This is actually my second turn on the Board, as I did a six-year stint back in the 1990s. But things have changed a lot.
Last year NAELA celebrated its 20th birthday. The brand-new "specialty" (you couldn't call it that back then) was born at a series of meetings at American Bar Association conventions in the mid-80s, and went public with a national convention/seminar of its very own in 1987, right here in Tucson, Arizona (at the Westward Look Resort, for those of you feeling nostalgic about now). It turned out that organizing a national meeting, securing meeting space, hotel rooms and food, getting state bar associations to recognize the continuing legal education, arranging for audiovisual needs and taping -- all of those things were, sadly, omitted from a traditional law school education. Along with classes on when and how to buy a printer or photocopier, how to actually talk to clients ... but that's another issue for another day.
Anyway, then-President of the brand-new NAELA, Tucson lawyer Allan Bogutz, found a local woman who could set up that first meeting, and (not incidentally) start running the organizaton. In fact, she owned a business which did just that for a handful of other organizations, and NAELA quickly became a client of Laury Adsit and her company, Management Plus. Twenty years and one merger later, that organization and a national management agency (Kellen Company) has served as NAELA's staff, executive director, meeting planner and dogsbody for its entire history.
For a few years now, it has seemed to many NAELA members and partisans that the organization may have outgrown its Tucson roots, and its outside-management-company structure. The Board of Directors has spent the past two years agonizing over whether it should stay with the familiar and comfortable, or move closer to the levers of power. Last month, the decision was finally made to relocate NAELA to the Washington, DC, area.
I voted with the majority to make that move (I was the only Tucsonan on the Board, so perhaps the only one forced to choose the organization's future over my own professional convenience). It is going to be scary, expensive and difficult -- but I'm pretty sure it is going to be good for NAELA, and for elder law.
NAELA is now looking for a new Executive Director. She or he will be an employee of NAELA -- the first real employee the organization has had. To those of us who have been around since the beginning (technically, that doesn't include me -- I joined just before that Tucson Symposium in 1987, which makes me one of the first 100-or-so members, but I was not one of the original organizers) this looks a little like the launching of one's own offspring. Coincidentally, my own younger child got married last year and moved out of our family home. Now I get to go through that bittersweet agony one more time.
I'm pretty confident NAELA will be stronger after the move. I look forward to the new challenges the organization, and elder law attorneys, will face in light of the transition.
One morning about two years ago I woke (as is my wont) to an NPR broadcast. The first words through my groggy morning semi-consciousness informed me that the US Census Department had determined that the most in-demand employment opportunity in ten years was expected to be "elder lawyer." At the time I thought "I don't know whether they mean old lawyer or lawyer for older clients, but either way I'm perfectly positioned." Now, with a newly invigorated NAELA behind me, it should be clear sailing to the horizon.
Robert B. Fleming
Fleming & Curti, PLC
Tucson, Arizona
www.elder-law.com
www.specialneedsalliance.com
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