JC: I think that is true. That may have
been one of the reasons that I was contact- ed initially, that there seemed to be a lack of representation over time from Addison County. I am delighted to be on the Board. Now, we have Dave as well.
BP: Yes, Dave as well. But as you said be-
fore we started to record this, there is only one person at the moment from Windham County and no one from Bennington Coun- ty or Caledonia County. JC: That’s right. Now we have Dave Carter from up in Grand Isle on the board, which is great. It is a good idea, I think, to pay some attention to making sure we have all corners of the state represented on the Board. In the future I am sure we will be looking to try and generate some interest from the south. I am sure folks from our southern counties see board participation as more difficult because the meetings typ- ically are in Montpelier; the travel times are more extreme. But it is really important to us that the Board represents all parts of the state and the practice spectrum.
BP: What do you think are the important sort of issues of the day? What do you feel the VBA as a whole should be focused on as we go into the next legislative session or as we go into 2012 in general?
JC: There are many issues that are on the
plate for the Association to be looking at. As you know Bob, because you have been so involved with them, the primary issues over the last two or three years have really presented themselves. During Eileen’s ten- ure, prior to this last year, the Board had to be very focused on the court restructuring. That was a necessity, and it was an over- whelming issue that the Board needed to deal with and address, and in fact did ad- dress and played a very active role with. Eileen was at the center of that effort and devoted countless hours to soliciting input from the bar and assisting various commit- tees and the legislature throughout the re- structuring process. During this past year, Teri has devoted countless hours on e-filing and the conversion of the court docketing system to an electronic format. She is in- credibly familiar with the court’s docketing system, being the Clerk of the Rutland Su- perior Court and could not be better po- sitioned to help work through the details of this complicated process. She has been working to get the membership of the VBA prepared and ready to deal with what is coming and what will be here within a year or two. I think the VBA, under Teri’s lead- ership, has been good about being out in front of that issue and trying to provide training and getting CLEs and other infor-
mation out to the membership. Teri has also spent many hours on access to justice issues, both on the VBF Board and in im- plementing a low bono project in her Court in Rutland. She has achieved an enormous amount in her time on the Board and as president. This year, I don’t know that a similar pre-eminent issue is, as we speak, on the table, which provides us with an op- portunity to actually look forward and try to figure out where we need to be as an association, twenty to fifty years from now. What sorts of services will the VBA need to be providing for our membership to be prepared and ready to engage in practice ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, and even one hun- dred years out into the future? Obviously, there are a lot of different ways to be look- ing at it, one is the technology and being sure that the membership has what it needs and that we are providing services that will provide the membership with access to the technologies that are quickly evolving. We don’t even know what those technologies will be ten to fifteen years from now, but we do need to keep pace and try to get ahead of the curve so that our membership is prepared to integrate those technologies into their practices. We also need to iden- tify what areas of the law small practices, as well as large practices, can engage in profitably, over the next ten, twenty, or fifty
6
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • FALL 2011
www.vtbar.org
Interview with VBA President Jim Carroll
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