Senior Lawyers.

• Author: Healy, Susan R.
• Position: Annual Reports of Committees of the Florida Bar: 2018-2019

We are the Senior Lawyers Committee, but don't confuse us with AARP. Most of us are age 55+, but we do have younger members, and we are currently are partnering with the Young Lawyers Division on programming. Our membership includes lawyers who are in different stages of their legal careers: some are semi-retired, while others are contemplating a change of career, retirement, or early retirement. Many of us have no plans to ever retire.

With 185 members joining or renewing their appointments this year, the Senior Lawyers Committee became the largest standing committee of The Florida Bar. What was perhaps even more impressive was the fact that almost one-third of our members committed to working on one or more of this year's projects.

To a great extent, our accomplishments this year--including our tremendous growth in membership --was the result of the Program Evaluation Committee's (PEC) review and recommendations. The PEC's recommendations, along with the results of our 2017 Survey of Florida Bar Members over the age of 55, focused our efforts and became the Senior Lawyers Committee's roadmap for 2018-19. (For information about the Senior Lawyers Survey, see the Senior Lawyers Committee 2017 annual report).

One of our first tasks this year was to restructure the committee to be able to take advantage of our almost 150 new members, most of whom were eager to be actively involved in the committee.

Now our structure includes a leadership team (chair, Vice Chairs Leslie Stein and Donald Smith, and Immediate Past-Chair Bill Davell) that holds monthly phone conferences with our Bar staff liaison, Cheryl Wright. The leadership team reviews the work of the committee's focus groups, who are the teams of member volunteers that do the heavy lifting on the committee's projects. The focus group structure grew out of our recognition that at this stage in our careers, we senior lawyers prefer to work on those discrete tasks that are of particular interest to us, as opposed to joining standing subcommittees that look impressive on our resumes.

The 2018-19 focus groups are:

* 50 Year-Member Luncheon--This year, the Senior Lawyer's Committee assumes responsibility for planning and hosting the 50-Year Member Luncheon held at the 2019 annual convention. We look forward to having the opportunity to honor the 1969 class of Florida Bar members and senior counselors.

* CLE Plug-Ins--CLE Plug-Ins are one-hour CLE presentations on topics relating to health and...