"Our challenge is to combine the best of the old with the promise of the new."

With those words two years ago, I asked you as members of the New Hampshire Bar Association to elect me as vice president. I am grateful that you honored my request. In June of 2005, I will renew my commitment to that challenge.

With your help and that of the Association's Board of Governors and its staff, I hope that I and the other officers will be able to bring you an organization that is as valuable as possible to your lives. Along with Rich McNamara, who will become the next president-elect, your new vice president, and Jim Gleason, who will become immediate past president, I will work toward that goal, while at the same time striving to maintain the value of the Association to our justice system and the public.

We want to help you in your professional lives.

This means fulfilling the promise of the 2004 Waterville Valley Leadership conference to reach out to newer lawyers, and to create a philosophy of inclusiveness for all lawyers who are a part of our Bar. The New Lawyers Committee, headed by Jennifer Parent, the CLE Committee, chaired by Russ Hilliard, and a committee that grew out of the conference, will be critical to these efforts.

These efforts include reaching out to solo and small firm lawyers, and embracing lawyers we have sometimes ignored, such as in-house counsel, public interest lawyers and government lawyers, to ensure we are fulfilling their needs. NHBA Executive Director Jeannine McCoy and I are working on new ways to engage and involve these members.

This means culling the valuable information you have supplied to us in the Bar's first e-survey, and using those remarks, observations and comments to make this Association more responsive and valuable to your practices. Both your continued participation in the surveys and our ability to disseminate valuable information to you from those surveys are critical.

We want to help you with your future.

This means bringing our resources to the table to help Chief Justice John Broderick's newly created Task Force on the Future of the Profession and ensuring that our Association helps you respond to the challenges it will identify.

This means working on initiatives we are anxiously awaiting from the Law Practice Management Task Force appointed by Jim Gleason and chaired by Bruce Dorner, that we hope will reap benefits for solo and small- firm lawyers in making their practices more rewarding.

We want to help you in the justice system.

This means working with the judges and staffs of the supreme, superior, district and probate courts to fulfill the promise of the justice system task forces on pro se litigation, family law and the current court system.

This means fulfilling the hopes expressed by those lawyers who attended the Waterville Valley conference: to create a justice system that solves problems of society through better access to lawyers and the skills we bring to help people in need. And it means convening the lawyers and legal organizations that provide help to those in need to re-evaluate the access-to-justice model in New Hampshire, and to consider new ideas to enhance that model.

But most of all, we want
you to be proud to be
a member of this Bar.

This means visiting you at your local and county bars, bringing you valuable information, tools, and yes, even inspiration, to practice your profession through new outreach programs.

This means finding new and innovative methods of involving you and others around you in the business of the Bar and the leadership of the Association in ways that match your interests and your time.

And most importantly, it means undertaking all of this work while never forgetting the values that so many of our past presidents and bar leaders have demonstrated in courageous and meaningful ways: the values of character, such as honesty, integrity, nobility, decency and respect. If we bring those values to the challenges and efforts we will undertake this coming year, then we, as an Association, can be nothing less than the best - for you, for the courts and for those who need us.

I truly look forward to serving all of you in the months to come. And I hope every one of you will write, call or e-mail me with your thoughts, comments and suggestions. It will be a great year!

Richard Y. Uchida, of the Concord law firm of Hebert & Uchida, takes office as NHBA President at the conclusion of the Annual Meeting on June 23-25, 2005. Contact him at richarduchida@hebertanduchida.com.

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