From the President of the Kbf

• Jurisdiction: Kansas,United States
• Citation: Vol. 89 No. 6 Pg. 09
• Pages: 09
• Publication year: 2020

From the President of the KBF No. 89 J. Kan. Bar Assn 6, 09 (2020) Kansas Bar Journal August, 2020

July, 2020

Please Hug the KBF Mission

by Scott Hill, KBF President

It was about this time in 2008 when I sat down to write my first column for The Journal of the Kansas Bar Association as the new KBA Young Lawyers Section ("YLS") President. At that time, I had been in practice for only about five years.

Here were my first three paragraphs of that column:

My charge over the next year as the author of this Young Lawyers Section column is to provide direction, education, or other enlightenment to the junior attorneys of our bar. If I follow that charge to a "T," I should only be writing to our younger members and anyone more than 35 years of age should just turn the page (I say that only figuratively; stick with me).

But before I reach out directly to the young lawyers, I want to take this opportunity to direct questions and comments to the senior bar. You might ask how addressing older attorneys provides direction, education, and/or enlightenment to young lawyers? A wise man once said, "Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for today. Teach his mentor to fish, and you fed him for a lifetime." Maybe that is not exactly how the quotation goes, but the point is, we can significantly impact the young lawyer by first reminding the senior members of a thing or two.

So I begin with a question: Have you hugged a young lawyer today? We have all heard the expression, "have you hugged your child today," meaning that parents need to show physical affection to children to nurture both physical and emotional development. But how does this translate to the practice of law? I hypothesize —no better yet I promise—through professional affection, you can nurture the development of our young lawyers.

It is now my pleasure in 2020 to serve the Kansas Bar Foundation ("KBF") as its President. In these last 12 years, I have graduated from the YLS and lost some hair (and what remains is pretty gray), but I feel like I have grown much as a person and a lawyer. However, I find that these "words of wisdom" from 2008 might be just as applicable today to the KBF.

Hear me out. First, I am not advocating that anyone hug anyone —keep your six feet of social distance (hopefully, in 12 more years we will have forgotten that term.) Second, I am not here to scold any non-fellows of the KBF. The connection is that we cannot only look to our own...