Before his visit to Sitka in May, Alaska Bar Association president Jeff Robinson attended the swearing-in ceremony last February for eight of the 19 newest Alaskan lawyers.
In Alaska – as in most states – you can’t practice law until you’re admitted to the Bar, and that means passing an infamously difficult exam (although the passing score recently has been lowered by 10 points, from 280 to 270).
But for Robinson, watching US federal judge Sharon Gleason administer the oath was more than seeing a kind of graduation. He was seeing the future, and he was hopeful.
“And it struck me how many of those new members of the bar were not born in Alaska, but come up here for a clerkship for one year or two years, and then end up making connections, deciding it’s a great state, a great community to raise your family,” Robinson said. “Judge Gleason, who’s a federal judge, gave this speech to the members who were being sworn in. What she said really resonated with me, which is, (Alaska) is a very small community, but you still have to up your game when you’re practicing before Justice Pate or some of the other judges on our courts. And it’s nice to have those relationships, but we still have a very high expectation of practice.”
Justice Jude Pate came to Sitka as a law student, passed the bar, became a public defender, superior court judge, and last year was named to Alaska’s highest court by Gov. Dunleavy.
That kind of career track remains possible, but the pandemic really strained the state’s court system – and everyone who works in it, including the lawyers. Robinson says the Alaska Bar is committed to supporting its members as the system recovers.
“I think it’s really challenging for young district attorneys, young assistant public defenders, to navigate a caseload without proper training and supervision,” said Robinson. “And so again, what we’re looking for is to increase the number of people who come here, increase the diversity of our Bar, increase the access to justice that people have in the courts, so that people can get quality representation. And so that the public, including the jurors that sit on these trials, or sit on grand jury, can trust in the confidence of the system.”
Anyone who’s ever been a party to a court case knows that the paperwork – motions, briefs, filings of all kinds – pile up. Robinson is aware of the temptation to use Artificial Intelligence, not just in legal work, but in any profession that relies on the written word. He says AI will not replace attorneys, but it could help them.
“We would like to think of law as a very sort of flexible field,” said Robinson. “On the other hand, we have tradition, right? We have stare decisis (the legal doctrine of aligning with previous court decisions in similar cases), and we have case law precedent. And I would like to think in terms of the filings that our lawyers are making, the way that the lawyers in the Alaska Bar are representing themselves before the court, that they are conscientious – that you just can’t plug something into an AI-generated chat machine, and produce a result that will not be fact-checked by actual human beings. So I’d like to think that, as of now the human being is still smarter than the computer, but we’re mindful of the speed in which AI is increasing in our field.”
In addition to providing a board of governors for the legal profession, and making disciplinary recommendations to the Alaska Supreme Court for attorneys who may have violated ethics rules – or even violated laws – the Alaska Bar Association provides direct service to consumers. Pro bono Bar director Krista Scully says bar volunteers answer up to three legal questions a year for income-qualified residents (who are not currently incarcerated), on civil or criminal matters – with complete confidentiality.
The free service is conducted over email – and it’s popular, especially in landlord-tenant disputes.
“We have a volunteer that has answered 300-plus questions over the course of a couple of years,” Scully said. “And I see this as a really important tool, especially for people who don’t live in urban areas who can’t walk directly into an office to get help.”
Among their outreach in Sitka, Bar Association members visited Sitka High’s Mock Trial team, a perennial champion in the state competition. Both Scully and Robinson were hopeful that there were future lawyers and judges on the team. “One of our broader goals,” said Robinson, “is to make the judges who hear the cases to be more reflective of the population (the court) serves.”
