The Bar's scorecard: the membership opinion survey.

• Author: Bookman, Alan B.
• Position: Florida - President's Page

The Florida Bar, along with its sections and divisions, has always placed great emphasis on providing the lawyers of Florida with high quality educational opportunities.

Based on your responses to the 2005 Membership Opinion Survey, we now know we're doing a good job.

Results from that survey show that you highly regard The Florida Bar's continuing legal education seminars. This year, 91 percent told us that the quality of the Bar CLE seminars is either excellent or good. CLE programs received the highest "desirability" score of all 21 listed Bar programs and services. That's good news to all the volunteers and the professional staff at the Bar who help facilitate this effort to provide approximately 85 quality CLE seminars annually. Also well received were the Bar's CLE practice manuals. Covering many areas of the law, these publications are viewed very favorably. According to the survey, 94 percent rated these publications as either desirable or highly desirable.

Other Bar services and programs that ranked highly include Ethics Opinions (94 percent), Lawyer Regulation (91 percent), the Bar News (91 percent), the Web site (90 percent), and Unlicensed Practice of Law (88 percent).

The Journal and News continue to lead the way in how our members obtain information about Bar resources, services, and activities. Slightly more than four-fifths (81 percent) of respondents listed the Journal and News as the leading sources of Bar information, followed by the Bar's Web site at 37 percent.

The Bar's Web site (from 76 percent in 1999 to 90 percent in 2005) and the Member Benefits Program (67 percent in 2001 to 81 percent in 2005) have both shown significant increases in the percentage of respondents who rated these programs as either desirable or highly desirable.

A majority of respondents (88 percent) are satisfied with the content and ease of use of www.floridabar.org, which the Bar recently redesigned to facilitate navigation. Features such as attorney search, the ability to update official Bar records, legal links, CLE program registration, CLE calendar search, CLE status information...