North Dakota Law Review Volume 45 Number 1 Article 6 1968 Proceedings of Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting - State Bar Association of North Dakota North Dakota State Bar Association Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/ndlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation North Dakota State Bar Association (1968) "Proceedings of Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting - State Bar Association of North Dakota," North Dakota Law Review: Vol. 45 : No. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://commons.und.edu/ndlr/vol45/iss1/6 This Bar Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Dakota Law Review by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PROCEEDINGS OF Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting STATE BAR ASSOCIATION OF NORTH DAKOTA Fargo, North Dakota June 27-28, 1968 THEODORE KELLOGG, President KENNETH G. PRINGLE, President-Elect JAMES D. SCHLOSSER, Secretary-Treasurer ALFRED C. SCHULTZ, Executive Director The meeting was held in the Elks Club Lodge Room at Fargo, North Dakota, on June 27-28, 1968, THEODORE KELLOGG of Dickinson, President, presiding. The transcript of the State Bar proceedings have been edited by Mr. Kenneth G. Pringle and the Law Review staff with portions of the proceedings deleted to save publication expenses. A complete copy of the transcript of the proceedings is available for review or inspection at any time in the association office in Bismarck, North Dakota. GENERAL ASSEMBLY 9 o'clock A. M. June 27, 1968 PRESIDENT KELLOGG: Fellow Lawyers, I now declare the sixty-eighth annual meeting of the State Bar Association of North Dakota in session. The invocation was said by the REVEREND HOWARD T. COLE, First Lutheran Church, Fargo. MR. NICK SCHUSTER, member of the Fargo City Commission, appeared on behalf of MAYOR HERSCHEL LASHKOWITZ in an address of welcome. KENNETH G. PRINGLE, of Minot, President-Elect, responded to the wel- coming address. PRESIDENT THEODORE KELLOGG was introduced and presented his report as follows: REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT I want to first say that this practice of giving a farewell address by the retiring president has become traditional with our organization and other Bar Associations throughout the country. Last week at the South Dakota Bar Association's Annual Meeting I discussed this practice with the pres- ident of that Association who was then in the throes of putting the finish- ing touches on his address and with the Nebraska Bar president who was also a guest, and we agreed that the tradition is one which might well be abolished and that the retiring president's remarks and recommendations could be set out in written report and the time used for more urgent business. We further agreed, however, that the next best thing is for the retiring president to make his swan song as brief as possible, and I will try to ob- serve that principle. I have also noted that these farewell addresses are usually divided into two parts: (1) The achievements that have been made under his administration; and BENCH AND BAR (2) The unsolved problems of the Association that will confront his suc- cessor in office. I will follow this outlline, and I regret to inform you that the first part, that is, the part dealing with the achievements of the present administration, will be rather brief, but that the next part, that is, the part dealing with the problems of the organization, will be somewhat more lengthy. Now dealing with the achievements, I would like to say that as president of your Association I am proud of the things that it has accomplished in the following respects: I think the Association has done a very, very fine job in the program of continuing legal education. This, in my judgment, is one of the most important objectives of any bar association. During the past year we have maintained a high level of accomplishment in this field. I have attended two of the seminars that the Association sponsored. One was on the legal economics, held at Bismarck in the early part of the year and it dealt mainly with law office management, accounting, making of charges and other matters of economics which are vital to all of us. It was very well handled and well attended. The continuation of this program, and this has been a program that has been well sustained over the years and a great deal of credit goes to the president-elect for maintaining that program. It has, I am sure, resulted in many thousands of dollars in increased income for the lawyers of this state. Continuation of this program is essential to the economic well-being of the lawyers in our state, and, as I mentioned to you, our president-elect has been most active in this field. The other seminar which I attended was in Fargo. It dealt with pro- cedure and particularly the application of the rules of discovery which of course now are the same in the State and Federal court. Two outstanding federal judges in this general area, Judge Robert Van Pelt of Nebraska and Judge Myles Lord of Minnesota, conducted the discussions and they did an excellent job. The program was well received and it was well attended with some fifteen percent of all the lawyers in the state in attendance at this seminar. In addition, the Association has sponsored and maintained liaison with other Bars of our neighboring states who have similar problems and who are comparable size. As we get further into some of the matters of discussion today, including the implications of the Keeton-O'Connell Bill, the problems of specialization, I think you will understand why it is important that Bars of the smaller states maintain the liaison with respect to these matters and in some cases try to present a solid or unified front with respect to the progress of these changes that are occurring in our profession. A special committee of the Executive Committee, including the immediate past president, Frank Jestrab, the president-elect, Ken Pringle, and headed by Robert Vaaler, worked on the problem of Association finances and budg- etary controls. That committee has done an excellent job and has laid down some guidelines and policy directives which I think will help us to avoid serious financial hazards in the future. I want to acknowledge the fine work that has been done by the stand- ing committees. The Committee on Civil Procedure that was first headed by Leonard Bucklin, later by Leroy Loder, has filed the proposed Rule revisions with the Supreme Court and I will presume that the Court will before long be inviting comments on those rules, on those Rule changes. The Committee on Interprofessional Relations has done a lot of work with doctors and with other professions, and I do not know of any com- mittee or member who has failed in its obligation to our Association. I think I have touched enough now about the accomplishments of the Association during the current year. I would like to talk to you about the problems that lie ahead of us and will confront my successor. In my judg- ment the chief of these problems during the preceding administration was the matter of judicial salaries in North Dakota. Our judges are the lowest paid in the United States. Our Association under Frank Jestrab's administra- 116 NORTH DAKOTA LAW REVIEW tion attacked this problem vigorously and while we did not achieve the re- sults for which we had hoped, we did make some progress with an increase of approximately $3,000 per annum in annual salaries. However, these in- creases that have been made in the meantime in the other states still leave us a very low-ranking position. I don't think we are quite 50th among the states as we were when the effort was made two years ago. But we are still among the bottom four or five states in the Union. It will be neces- sary in my judgment for this Association to take positive action and to spend some money to bring judicial salaries and retirement benefits to a level that will maintain the quality of our judiciary. This in my opinion will be one of the most serious problems of my successor and the Associ- ation during the next year. It is vital to our profession as well as to our state, that we maintain a high level of judicial dignity and integrity and ability, and I hope that we will continue to attack this problem so that we can bring our judges' salaries to a respectable level among the states of the Union. I would like to talk to you now about the general financial affairs and problems of the Association. At the outset of my year in office it was nec- essary for me to ask for voluntary contributions from the members of the Bar in addition to their annual statutory fee. The response to this plea was most gratifying and enabled us to absorb, in the main, the shock which your budget had received from a combination of unusual expenses, including our expenses in connection with the Pattern Jury Instructions, the effort to obtain an increase in judicial salaries, the work of the Association in con- nection with the proposed amendment relative to the judicial tenure and appointment, and some unusual expenses relating to publication of the Law Review and the support of the University Law School. Leaving out of con- sideration these costs, many of which it is hoped will be non-recurring, it appears to me on the basis of the study of the Finance Committee to which I referred earlier and the current budget that this Association will not be able to continue its program at present levels without an increase in rev- enues.