Lead from the Front on the AYLA Board of Directors

AYLA PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

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

Leadership opportunities are all too rare for young attorneys. At the beginning of your career, you go from a cocksure 3L who has law school all figured out to a world where the term “baby” is almost universally used to describe you as an educated, licensed professional. You may have courageously memorized civil procedure or the UCC going into the bar exam, but now you find yourself in wholly uncharted territories that include the ugly truth of how the practice of law is a business, client control, and inneroffice politics. Law schools rarely—if ever—cover any of the latter topics, even though they quite frankly crop up far more often than any procedural quagmire.

As a result, you start your career at the very bottom of the pecking order. Every paralegal in your building could do a better job than you at the day-to-day tasks of being a lawyer. The receptionist knows the building layout, personnel, and office workflow better than you do. Forget team-leader opportunities. Your role at the beginning is to shadow other attorneys, do the most basic of legal tasks assigned to you piecemeal, and overall find your bearings in the trade.

Very rarely will any young attorney be granted the opportunity to be a leader at work more so than what being an AYLA officer provides.

Emma Hilbert, Justice Chari Kelly, and Bev Bass attend the 2022 Judicial Reception.

As time progresses, most jobs thankfully will change and progress as time goes on. (Pro tip: If your job does not, you should start looking for a better job.) You will eventually be given your own cases or projects, but they will be of a size where “team leader” is hardly a fair descriptor for a team of one. You might eventually be assigned a paralegal or a legal assistant, but you will probably share that assignment with attorneys with more tenure and correspondingly more priority attention from staff. That’s the breaks of being a baby attorney.

The board of directors of the Austin Young Lawyers Association stands as one of the few opportunities to learn how to be a leader of (wo)men for young attorneys in Austin. AYLA is a nonprofit entity that hosts and operates many, or perhaps most, of the legal events in Austin—including judicial events, mixers, CLEs, volunteer events, and much more. AYLA has a budget, staff support, bylaws, voting procedures, board meetings, and committees, and these are all collectively shepherded year in and year out by the AYLA board of directors. Save for the true hero of AYLA—Debbie Kelly—there is no adjunct professor to watch over and guide you. Instead, you learn as you go from trial and error and from observing your peers—preferably fellow officers who have years of institutional knowledge to spare. You will lead committees. You will run events. You will help run board meetings. All of the above often includes creating meeting agendas, herding cats, and painstakingly moving the ball forward as the team leader—but at its very base those tasks are what leadership experience often boils down to, and how leadership as a skillset is honed. Very rarely will any young attorney be granted the opportunity to be a leader at work more so than what being an AYLA officer provides.

If you have any notion of wanting to take on leadership roles at work or in your community in the future, I urge you to throw your hat in the ring and sign up to run for a director position on the AYLA board for this coming bar year. Be sure to submit your nomination form—requiring a mere ten signatures, which we can help you obtain—by March 3, 2023. In the long run, you will not be sorry you did.

Blair Leake