AYLA Is a Pillar of the Austin Legal Community

AUSTIN YOUNG LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

But Only As Long As the Austin Legal Community Actively Engages

BY BLAIR LEAKE, WRIGHT & GREENHILL, P.C.

Think back to the first time you went to a legal event—freshly licensed and unsure of your place in the world–and walked into a room full of carousing attorneys. Either you did not know a soul, or at best you latched onto the one or two persons you did know and followed them around like a duckling in tow. Think back to the first time you walked into a courtroom and were so green as to not even know where to sit, much less the names of the attorneys, bailiffs, and clerks bantering all around you.

For most of us, those were awkward days. One group—the Austin Young Lawyers Association (AYLA)—has for decades helped make that awkward transition for our newest attorneys far more palatable for them, and far more constructive for the rest of us. By collectively being engaged with and supportive of AYLA, we as a legal community have long created both inertia and opportunities to actively assimilate new attorneys into our city’s cooperative legal culture, consequently helping to ward off the cutthroat, unyielding legal cultures prevalent in some of our state’s largest cities. Nothing greases the wheels of a Rule 11 extension request quite like rapport.

By collectively being engaged with and supportive of AYLA, we as a legal community have long created both inertia and opportunities to actively assimilate new attorneys into our city’s cooperative legal culture, consequently helping to ward off the cutthroat, unyielding legal cultures prevalent in some of our state’s largest cities.

For at least 30 years, AYLA has fostered and accelerated attorney rapport and fraternity through hosting monthly and yearly events. These events allow new attorneys to bond with other new attorneys as peers, and to learn from seasoned attorneys as mentors and role models. The organization itself has also served as an incubator by carving out a place for young attorneys to not just participate but also to actually lead and run an entire organization. AYLA thus functions as a de facto farm league developing and building a bench of local attorneys ready to take on leadership roles within our community, whether it be in a legal capacity or otherwise.

The entire construct that is AYLA—and the benefits it has long provided us—will fall apart, however, if we as a legal community let it. Money is important, but nothing like a lack of engagement will kill it quite as fast. AYLA has for almost two years now been forced to postpone and fundamentally alter most of its events, and—if we are being honest—those alterations have rarely been for the better. War story punchlines just never seem to land the same when delivered over Zoom.

Despite Omicron-induced delays and frustrations, AYLA’s stable of monthly and yearly social events stands on the precipice of beginning again in full force for the first time in almost two years. Now is the time for you to reconnect and reengage. Attend Bench Bar. Start a conversation with a new attorney at a Docket Call happy hour. Sign up for a volunteer shift at a monthly Community Service Days event. Eat barbecue at an AYLA tailgate. Run for a position on the AYLA board or encourage young attorneys you know to do so. Whatever you do, do your part to make sure that the various pillars of our legal community that have helped shape it do not diminish, lest the culture we have built and enjoy follow suit. AL

Blair Leake is an attorney and shareholder at Wright & Greenhill, P.C. and is president-elect of the Austin Young Lawyers Association.