What’s New in 2023?

Reflexiones

By Donna McElroy San Antonio Bar Association President

Thirty-six years ago, a wide-eyed young, firstgeneration attorney moved to San Antonio, Texas, to begin her legal career. Even though the only people I knew in San Antonio were the lawyers I met while working as a summer associate at what was then Cox & Smith, I decided that San Antonio was a place that presented me with an excellent opportunity to have a career and a life. I loved the culture, the history, the small town in a big city, and most importantly, the people I encountered. Among the experiences that brought me here was a hotly contested hearing in bankruptcy court, after which the judge invited all of the lawyers to his chambers to chat about personal lives and to tell the summer associates in the group about the San Antonio legal community and why it was better than those in other big Texas cities (He was right.). After we left the hearing, the partner I was with insisted that we go visit the Alamo in business suits, carrying briefcases as we walked through the mission, because it was right there, and I had not seen it yet. Couple that with eating tacos for breakfast for the first time, spaghetti for lunch at the Milam, Queso Flameado and margaritas on the rocks at La Fogata, and I was, and continue to be, hooked!

I wanted to build my legal career here because although San Antonio’s legal community was comprised of hardworking lawyers who advocated for their clients and treated one another professionally and respectfully in the courtroom, it was also a community comprised of lawyers that could visit amicably about kids, sports, or other personal issues in a judge’s chambers after a contested hearing or chat with one another in the checkout line at HEB later that evening.

The collegiality of the San Antonio Bar has not just continued through the years, but it has also improved. A strong part of this collegiality comes from the time lawyers spend together in person, and this time spent together also helps young lawyers learn and develop as practitioners. So I am very happy to announce that SABA’s new space will actually be opened in early 2023. Lawrence said in his message last year that it would be opened on April 1, 2022, but many people missed that April fool’s joke! Truly, new space is coming in 2023. This will be a central space near the courthouse that will allow us to come together in person more frequently.

As your 2022-23 SABA president, I look forward to our continuing to rekindle our in-person events and expand our reach to more members of the San Antonio legal community. Looking at each other on the “Brady Bunch” style screens simply does not offer the same benefits.

The other area of focus is to continue to build the Dawn Bruner Finlayson Fellowship program, which provides needbased financial assistance to first-generation students who excel academically and are interested in spending their legal careers in San Antonio. Through the work of the Fellowship Committee, we were able to launch the First Annual Fellowship scholarships, and we awarded $32,500 in scholarships to three law students, three undergraduate students, and a student court reporter. More importantly, we raised $55,000 at the Gala to add to the scholarship corpus, and we intend to grow the corpus to be selfsustaining.

Also, we are working on a pilot program to connect small businesses with transactional lawyers who can help get the proper (not from Google) documents for their businesses, whether for a new business or for structuring the transfer of an established family-owned business to the next generation. We will look to connect transactional SABA members to these businesses for fee-based transactions that are priced at a level that will let the clients and the lawyers grow together in their businesses and legal practices. We believe this will help us continue to grow SABA’s membership, in part by bringing attorneys into SABA that we might not otherwise meet because they are not usually at the courthouse.

I am honored and humbled to serve as your President. Please plan to come, in person, to our events! There is something for everyone: a grand opening for our new space, a Clay Shoot, a Law Day Luncheon, a Pickle Ball Tournament, a Chili Cookoff, and many CLEs and other events with adult refreshments to be held in our new space. Plans are also in the works to bring back the Super Super Bar, in collaboration with the affinity bars that, together with SABA, make the San Antonio legal community one that other legal communities envy! I welcome ideas about what SABA can do for you or how to continue to expand our ranks. Of course, remember if it is your idea, you might be the new committee chair!

Donna McElroy at Mission San Jose in San Antonio.

Photo by Mewborne Photography.