The ABA is effectively a special interest group who primarily legislates for attorneys. They are supposed to do more, but they really don’t. They also continue to accredit worthless schools and seemingly refuse to disqualify the lowest of the low as they should be doing. So what about your local State / County / City / Metropolitan bar association? What do they do? Is it worth paying to be a member of the ABA or your state and local bar association?
Well the first thing they do is they all offer you a free year membership once you pass the bar. At one point I think I was titularly a member of 7 bar associations between state and local level. They also offer discount on CLEs in your area, which became significantly less of an incentive once I found 4freecle.blogspot.com and their email listserv of free CLEs. And those CLEs are not all the free CLEs offered in your area, usually there are a ton between events at Legal Aid, the local courthouse / city hall, and the local law school. But you only need so many, so you can usually meet your bi-yearly requirement just through the website.
I ended up asking a senior partner of a large law firm what benefit there really was to joining any of these multiple bar associations. They thought for a moment and then told me there really wasn’t any. Local bar associations are more akin to social organizations where attorneys can network with each other, think Rotary club or Kiwanis. So, if your practice doesn’t rely on referrals from your local peers, there is no reason at all to join. Some local ones offer attorney referral services in which your name gets thrown out to people who call in looking for a referral so long as you are a member, which may or may not be worth joining for depending on your viewpoint. The referrals might be so few and far between, or of such low quality (no-pay) that enlisting in the referral service might be a detriment, so consider accordingly.
Some states apparently require that you pony up the money. To be able to practice you need to belong to the Bar Assoc. (GA, NC, among others). Sorta sucks since you are getting hit for dues to the actual Bar and its social arm, Bar association whether you want to belong or not. After looking around a bit, I did find one real positive, some local bars give you access to FastCase (the poor man’s Westlaw), or similar single state based case law archives. That is assuming you need to do case research, which not everyone does.
My goodness, I almost forget what the local associations are best at… newsletters. I got so many junk bar e-newsletters that I setup a ‘Law Spam’ folder for them to all fall into. And of course, most of them also send you a paper copy once in a while too.
I suppose it is mostly irrelevant however. Its not like I have the money to throw away on them anyway.
Why should I renew? <– Pretty good discussion on pros and cons
Yes, Join the local bar assoc. <– He seems to just reiterate it is a social club…