THE ADVOCATE Newsletter of The Baltimore County Bar Association VOLUME XXX, NO. 3
November 2020
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE By Jay D. Miller As I write this message, we are approaching an election that has the country divided. The COVID nightmare continues and many of us continue to work remotely from home. By the time of publication, a new Supreme Court justice will have been confirmed that has firmly entrenched a 6-3 conservative majority that some of you may not agree with. There are plenty of reasons and excuses to feel angry or sad, or even depressed. How can you change that? Be thankful. Better yet — be grateful. Thanksgiving is failed, and if it was light, you had passed. Oh, I coming and an attitude of gratitude can literally should mention to all of you who graduated law school after 2006, our results were sent by mail, yes, change your life. regular mail. Physical mailbox mail. And all I Remember graduation from college (you know, when remember is that I passed. We finally got a date for we sat in an auditorium or sports arena among our admissions ceremony and became fully engaged thousands of our peers without face coverings, in the practice of law. breathing on the people next to us without a worry in the world)? Remember desperately waiting to hear if Be grateful that you are an attorney. Did you know you were accepted into law school? And after being that only .3 % of the people in the United States are accepted, remember the struggle? The late nights practicing attorneys? Why not more? Because it is studying and the cramming for exams? The fear of hard. It’s damn hard. But I am smiling right now being called on at 8am to explain the holding in thinking about it because I don’t know what the International Shoe v. Washington to your professor alternative would have been for me. I am so and the other 200 persons in the lecture hall? Then, grateful. I am in a profession today that is centered after three or four years of that, you still had to pass around helping people who cannot help themselves. the bar exam? So, I am grateful that I was able to get Our clients come to us when they do not have the through all that studying, cramming, and fierce power to achieve justice on their own, we are the ones competition and can practice law. I can still enlisted do it on their behalves. And with that very remember waiting on my bar exam results, chasing big responsibility comes a magnitude of stressors, the mailman down the street in six inches of snow (or anxiety, and insecurity. Add to that the tension of was it sunny?), praying that the envelope was light. current politics and world health crisis. The rumor was that if the letter was heavy you had Continued on page 2
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November 2020