Once upon a time there was a pig who spoke eight languages and did sculpture with pieces of wood and rusted metal he found on his travels. One day he was out in the woods working on a new installation piece and he met a family from a small town in Tennessee. They had been walking for days. The dad saw the pig and said “what are you doing little piggie?" They were all quite surprised when the pig said “working with counterbalanced forces using found objects.” They all stood around and looked at the piece for a long time. No one said anything. Finally, the dad shrugged and turned to the mom and said “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” and then they killed the pig and ate him.

We all know what we like, but I hope we do not miss the quality of life in achieving quantitatively what we want. All of us want to achieve, but we must also give back in order that what we achieve, is worthwhile. Hopefully as fellow and sister members of this Association, we can improve ourselves and also improve those people (and their situations) who come into contact with us as our clients, our families and our friends.

How blessed we are to know each other and to hopefully appreciate each other. We are indeed blessed to be involved in a profession that is designed to cause us to revisit each other as we progress from case to case, issue to issue, settlement to settlement, and trial to trial. For over eighty years, positive interaction between and among our members has been the hallmark of our Association. We have many fine traditions and I hope with your help to not only maintain our fine traditions but also to maintain the quality and quantity of service to our members. One recent tradition that deserves comment is that since 1986, a member of the judiciary (either a judge or a master or both for that matter) has been on the Executive Council either as an at large member or as an officer. Honorable John Grason Turnbull started this wild flower-type tradition and it would have ended with the departure of Master C. Theresa Beck as she loses the status of immediate Past President, relinquishing that ex-officio position on the Executive Council to my predecessor, John Nagle. However, the Association is fortunate to have as its newest at large member of the Executive Council the Honorable Alexander Wright, Jr. For the next eleven years, the tradition, if you will, continues of having a judge or master in a leadership position of this Association.

As I begin my term, we are fortunate to have a combined fifty-five years of experience in the Executive Council, augmented by the twenty-five years the new chairpersons bring as a group to their committees. Accordingly, there are eighty years of “institutional knowledge” in place as we begin the next fiscal year on July 1, 2001. Add to that the knowledge and willingness to help out when necessary of twenty-nine living Past Presidents, not to mention the day-to-day efforts of Carole Otte as Lawyer Referral Coordinator and of Heather Martin as our Executive Director, and one is reminded of the comment by the Honorable John O. Hennegan when he became President in July, 1998 that there really was not very much that needed change.

What we do need though today, I believe, is to reach out to our neighboring Bar Associations. I am happy to report that our very own Ron Cherry of the Monumental Bar Association is working with our Association to put on a mock trial of sorts in the Fall, featuring prominent Baltimore City lawyers along with some of our local barristers and hopefully one of our Judges. This is the type of cross pollination that I believe will benefit both our Association and the Monumental Bar Association.

In like fashion, another current need we should address is school violence. While we are not well situated to take on certain issues such as contested judicial elections, jury pay, mandatory pro bono, mandatory continuing legal education, etc., I believe we can make a difference in our community working with the public and private schools in Baltimore County. I plan to form a task force to work with the school counselors at the elementary, middle and high school levels to establish peer mediation programs. This endeavor will probably take more than the one year of my term but it is consistent, I believe, with the effort of the Honorable J. Norris Byrnes who was instrumental when he took office as President in 1995 in forming a joint committee on domestic violence between our Association and the Baltimore City Bar Association. Again, we need to cross pollinate with our fellow and sister lawyers both within our Association and also without our Association within our Metropolitan legal community.

Along the way hopefully we can improve the interpersonal relationships between and among lawyers as we work more and more with different people on different projects.

As the Honorable Lawrence R. Daniels requested when he took office as President in 1997, I need for each of you to communicate either directly with me or through the officers and at large members of the Executive Council (or if desired through the committee chairpersons) if anyone of you has any comment, criticism, observation or suggestion that would make our Association even better then it is.

I wish each of you a safe and enjoyable summer and come September when the young children start back to school, we older children will start back to our committee meetings, etc. culminating before you know it in the next transition of leadership from me to my good friend Steve Nolan. In closing, I want to thank John Nagle for the great year of service he has given this Association. We have never been better off technologically or fiscally. I am indeed humbled to be his successor as President of this Association. Godspeed, John.