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Bar News - January 23, 2004 Bar's CLE Director Helps Members Avert NHMCLE Sanctions In the Member's Corner... WHILE 87 OUT OF more than 4,000 active members may constitute a small percentage of the Bar, it was too high a share for NHBA•CLE Director Joanne Hinnendael. That was the number of members who, as of November, were facing increasing fines imposed by the Supreme Court's NHMCLE Board for failing to submit NHMCLE reports for the last reporting period. The challenge was to help members avoid the hassles and costs of fines and suspensions. As the manager responsible for the Continuing Legal Education program, Hinnendael made it a personal campaign to try to contact all of those facing suspension to help them file their reports, or, in most cases, to help them find programs that would bring them into compliance. (The NHMCLE Board had contacted all of the non-filers by mail at least four times, but for a variety of reasons, these members had not complied.) Through mailings, e-mailings and telephone calls throughout December, Hinnendael managed to contact all but a handful of the non-filers. Many took advantage of the Bar's new online CLE offerings - which grant "live" credit by providing interactive links to faculty through e-mail - or obtained CLE videos or audiotapes. Hinnendael also helped a number of attorneys file their compliance reports using an automated NHMCLE reporting form on the Bar's Web site that walks filers through the process and automatically calculates the hours required and handles carryover credit issues. In a few cases, tuition for a program was waived. The conversations Hinnendael had also enabled her to counter some of the myths and confusions about NHBA•CLE and the NHMCLE compliance program. Although both are located at the Bar Center, NHMCLE compliance is administered according to Supreme Court Rule 53 under the direction of the Supreme Court committee, and the fines it collects have no impact on Bar Association finances. Many members, Hinnendael discovered, believed that the Bar set the levels of the fines and collected the fine income, when, in reality, NHMCLE deadlines and fines are set forth by the Supreme Court rule. Hinnendael said she was gratified by the response of those with whom she spoke directly. "Everyone was very thankful for the help. That made it very rewarding for me," Hinnendael said. "This is a great example of two phenomena -the misperception of what the NHBA is and isn't, and how the unified Bar works in small, quiet ways to help individual members," said Jeannine McCoy, NHBA executive director.
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