Aiming for the Moon
Professionalism starts with who we understand ourselves to be.
By Frank E. Stevenson
Editor’s Note: Frank Stevenson is the 2019 recipient of the Morris
Harrell Professionalism Award, which honors the “attorney who best
exemplifies, by their conduct and character, truly professional traits
who others seek to emulate and who all in the bar admire.” Stevenson was
recognized by the Dallas Bar Association and the Texas Center for Legal
Ethics and Professionalism at an award ceremony on November 15 at the
Belo Mansion. The following is an excerpt of his acceptance
speech.
Shortly after John F. Kennedy announced our nation’s resolve to place
a man on the moon by the close of that decade, he toured the NASA space
center for the first time. Seeing a janitor carrying a broom, President
Kennedy left his official entourage and walked over and asked what he
was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man
on the moon.”
It’s an instructive anecdote for what it says about
self-understanding. In 1962 when JFK took that tour, NASA must have
employed a hundred janitors. And in the strictest sense, all of them did
exactly the same thing. But in any sense that matters, they weren’t
doing remotely the same thing. The difference was not in what they were
doing, but in what they understood themselves as doing. Some were
pushing brooms; some were putting men on the moon.
You and I are presented that exact same choice every single day,
whatever our line of work. We have the option to aim low in our
self-understanding of what it is we do and who we are. Or we have the
option to aim high. How high? Well, how ’bout the moon?
For the last 100 years, the trajectory of legal ethics in America has
tilted toward pushing brooms.
The first nationally promulgated ethical standards were the Canons
of Ethics adopted by the American Bar Association in 1908. The
canons were strictly aspirational, ennobling, and infused with a strong
moral component of what a lawyer should do, in distinction to what a
lawyer must do.
In 1969, the ABA replaced the canons with the Code of Professional
Responsibility. The code retained aspirational elements, just like
the 1908 canons, but added Disciplinary Rules—minimum standards and the
absolute lowest level of conduct to which an attorney could stoop
without being subject to discipline.
In 1983, the ABA adopted the Model Rules of Professional
Conduct, which remain in effect today. The model rules dropped all
aspirational features, leaving only black-letter minimum rules and
explanatory comments.
Thus American legal ethics had completed a 180-degree shift—starting
out as entirely aspirational and moral, progressing to add hard-and-fast
minimum standards to the aspirational elements, and concluding with
solely minimum standards with no aspirational elements at all. It seems
to me that lawyers who understand themselves and what they do as
countenancing conduct compliant with just the minimum standard, just
short of discipline, are pushing brooms.
Fortunately, state, metro, and specialty bar associations came to the
realization that the absence of any appeal to the profession’s higher
virtues in the ABA Rules was contributing to an erosion of civility
among lawyers and a decline in the overall dignity of the profession.
With the aspirational and moral elements of legal ethics having been
wrung out like water from a chamois, these bar associations shifted
their attention to a wholly different and higher standard.
A standard called “professionalism.”
These associations began formulating their own professionalism
statements about how lawyers should comport themselves, and not simply
how they must.
Roughly 150 different professionalism statements have been issued, but
none more significant than the Texas Lawyer’s Creed: A Mandate for
Professionalism, which was promulgated exactly 30 years ago, almost
to this very day.
The first thing the creed requires its subscribers to profess is not
how they should act or even what they believe, but who they are—“I am a
lawyer” is its opening line. Only after that does the creed propose how
a Texas lawyer ought to behave.
Beginning with a profession of identity, not of conduct, suggests that
professionalism itself is in large part a matter of who we understand
ourselves to be and what we understand ourselves to be engaged in. So,
just like the NASA janitor, it’s an issue of
self-understanding.TBJ
To read the entire speech, go to texasbar.com/stevensonspeech.
FRANK E. STEVENSON
is a partner
in Locke Lord LLP and the vice president of the Western States Bar
Conference. He served as the 2016-2017 State Bar of Texas president.
