(Originally published Oklahoma Bar Journal March 28, 1998 - Vol. 69; No. 13)  

The Decline Of Professionalism
By John S. Athens

Let me at the outset dispel any notion that the title of this paper is intended to imply that there has been a decline in the legal competence, industry, innovation or dedication of today's lawyers. Today's lawyers are as capable as yesterday's lawyers. This article addresses only "professionalism."

Most of us will agree that "professionalism" means more than adherence to the Oklahoma Bar's Rules of Professional Conduct and the American Bar's Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Indeed, the introductory Scope which appears before each set of Rules states:

The Rules do not, however, exhaust the moral and ethical considerations that should inform a lawyer, for no worthwhile human activity can be completely defined by legal rules. The Rules simply provide a framework for the ethical practice of law.

In 1997, early in his term of office, newly elected American Bar President Jerome J. Shestack promised to focus on six points of what he said are our professional values: ethics and integrity, competence with independence, meaningful learning, civility, obligations to the justice system and the rule of law, and pro bono service.  I have used the word "professionalism" throughout this paper in its broadest sense.  From the perspective of a lawyer who has practiced for 50 years, mainly in trial work, there appears to have been a marked erosion in professionalism with the passage of time. I am not suggesting that lawyers are out of step with the times. On the contrary, we lawyers are too much of the times. Twenty years ago, Alexander Soltzhenitsyn observed that 20th century society was suffering from moral poverty. The situation has gotten worse. In recent years, America has seen, among other profound changes, a lessening of respect for the rule of law and for all rules, all authority, including parental, decreasing loyalty to employer or partnership, the phenomenon of "roller-skating" from job to job, and a rise in juvenile delinquency. In Oklahoma, we see an increasing crime rate and decreasing respect for institutions such as marriage, i.e., the number of divorces in Oklahoma each year now almost equals the number of marriages entered into. These are only some of the changes resulting in what George Will calls the "coarsening of American life."  And lest I be accused of denigrating today's lawyers, of being nostalgic, of refusing to acknowledge change and of white-washing the faults of "the good old boys" of past years, let me be among the first to acknowledge that we had some pretty bad actors in my early days. I recall two usually respectable lawyers, after a heated court hearing, engaging in a fist-fight on the marble staircase of the old courthouse almost 50 years ago. That is the most extreme, but, I'm sorry to say, certainly not the sole example of bad conduct that I can remember. But it was remarkable enough to be memorable even today. Each generation has its sinners.  The stern admonition we heard from our professors when I was in law school that "the law is not a money grubbing business" may not sound familiar to many lawyers today. And the fact that it doesn't ring a bell with many lawyers today may, in itself, indicate how much the profession has changed with the times. In my view, the practice of law has become a business. It has become money oriented.There is nothing original in that thought. Witness what other lawyers think.1 Mark Byers, Director of the Harvard Law School Office of Placing and a partner of the Center for Professional Development, says: 

[The profession] traditionally held out the ideas of independence, intellectual satisfaction and an affluent lifestyle. Now not much is left but the affluence.

The profession as I know it is obsessed with money, not with professional accomplishments, merit or justice.

When I started out [in the 1960s] the only expectation was you had to do a very good job doing legal work, that's still there. But on top of that is the need to meet billable-hour goals and to demonstrate an ability to win business. So the pressure has tripled.

A San Francisco lawyer complained that 

We went to law school to be lawyers, not salesmen.

I believe the two factors destroying professionalism in the legal profession over the last 30 years are advertising and law office excessive economic emphasis on the hourly charge. John Frank, an outstanding lawyer in Phoenix, Arizona, said it best when recently he received the Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Award for Professionalism and Ethics:

'This ceremony in this room brings to mind some colorful moments in my life, but most sadly of all, it reminds me of my greatest failure. It is here, by a five to four vote, in 1977 that I lost Bates v. O'Steen, the lawyers advertising case, in which Irepresented the State Bar of Arizona. 

The advertising came with other drastic changes in the profession. We have all of us in the past 25 years experienced the conversion of the profession into a moneymaking machine and have seen small offices, and sometimes large ones, steamrollered into oblivion. The demand for hours, the upping from 1,600 to 1,800 to 2,000 to 2,200 or more, and this as the measurement not merely of success but of survival, has totally changed the culture we knew. I suspect every practitioner in this room has the same experience that I do: If I wish to assign a pro bono matter to an associate, I have to take into account how his chargeable hours are going for the year, and mine is perhaps one of the relatively few remaining firms that puts a premium on public service. The law factory has become the assembly line, rotation diminishes, and the enchantment drains out of the profession. More and more associates migrate from office to office in the search of a satisfaction which all too many will never find. As the prices for our services have been driven up, the corporate general counsel necessarily must control how the law is practiced and in-house counsel take over more of the work. 

In short, the concept of the law factory as simply a large office has now come to connote an hour-driven machine; the lawyer looks more and more like the blue collar worker punching a time clock for the business he serves.' 

Advertising by lawyers has reached a point never imagined by Mr. Frank. One of my partners recently received a phone call in which he was offered a videotape from a lawyers' advertising group making TV sales commercials for lawyers. I urged him to accept it and recently looked at it. In the video, the offeror undertakes to make three-minute videotapes for subscribing lawyers in which client attorneys tell their success stories. A couple of weeks ago, I received a mail-out from a law firm soliciting lawyers whose clients have accident claims only against truck drivers and as I write this I am reading a request (the second in six months) from a group that is currently in the process of compiling a computerized database of aviation related cases, motions, interrogatories and briefs which, when complete, will be accessible to both its clients and the counsel it retains to represent them! It is anticipated that the database will expedite and economize litigation by supplying counsel with model documents concerning issues which repeatedly confront clients in various jurisdictions. The practice of advertising for lawyers has become much too specialized! One wonders how long it will be before we have billboard advertising by lawyers in Oklahoma!  I am not suggesting that making money wasn't always one of our aims. I am talking about emphasis. An excellent and highly respected New York lawyer friend of my age, retired since 1993, with whom I had the pleasure of working for 11 years defending what commenced as essentially a two party Tulsa County District Court case and escalated into 40 or more class actions, all but one of which were consolidated for trial in The Southern District of New York, recently wrote me: 

I'm glad I don't have to start all over again. If I had to, it would not be in the litigation end (racquet?). I was very lucky to have had almost 40 out of 45 years of genuine pleasure in the law practice (1948-1988 circa). We had a great firm --- every partner had the talent to do well in other lines of endeavor and incidentally make a lot more money, but they all chose the law because we really enjoyed the practice and actually were convinced we were making a modest contribution to the working of a civilized society. This was before the days of the BIG MONEY class action practices, before the days of hourly charges, before the days of the mega sized law firms where everything was subordinated to the bottom line.

But what specific factors have caused lawyers to emphasize the goal of making money more than they did in prior years?  For one thing the practice of law has become fiercely competitive. I don't mean the envy and back-biting and one-upmanship that many lawyers say they are experiencing from their colleagues today. Fortunately, I have not experienced that type of ugliness in my practice. But I do know that here and throughout the country, every serious automobile accident is followed by a combination of at least 15-20 letters, phone calls and visits from lawyers offering their services to those involved.  But why have we become so competitive?  It is not merely because lawyers are eager for a greater and greater share of the pie. It is also because the problems we are asked to solve are more complex as well as more numerous, as witness the ever-increasing number of laws and growing claims for relief and regulations and tribunals.  Consider the explosion in recent years in the filing of employment law related claims arising out of new interpretations of older statutes, i.e., the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "Title VII," as well as those arising from more recent statutes, i.e., the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA). Chief U.S. District Judge Terry Kern of The Northern District of Oklahoma recently estimated that as many as a staggering 20% of all cases which go to trial in that district are employment cases.  And lawyers have also become more competitive because the number of lawyers is growing proportionately as rapidly, if not more rapidly, than the increasing number and complexity of the problems we are asked to address. The growth in the number of lawyers in the last 45 years has been exponential.

If anyone needs proof of that, consider the following tables:4

Incidentally, in 1989, at one lawyer per 356 people, the United States had more lawyers per person than any other developed nation in the world. The closest to us were Germany, with one lawyer per 901 people, England and Wales with one lawyer per 1,220, and Japan with only one lawyer per 9,091!5  Do we have more lawyers because we are more litigious? Or are we more litigious because we have more lawyers? The answer to both questions is probably "yes." And one thing is certainly true. We have more lawyers because law schools are training and graduating more lawyers. And why is that? Of course, it is axiomatic that all organized bodies will do what they must to meet demands for their product. That's what law schools have done, grown with demand. And that demand is caused in part by population growth and perhaps even more by the number and complexity of the legal problems which need to be solved in today's world. I do not contend, and have never contended, that there are too many lawyers. There are more lawyers because, in my view, lawyers are working increasingly harder and longer hours to solve the more numerous and complex problems.  One respected lawyer recently wrote that we need more lawyers to maintain our independent way of life in the face of increasing government regulation. That is the problem that people with autocratic government do not --- indeed, unfortunately cannot --- do anything about.  Another thing that has made lawyering more a business than a profession is the fact that our clients have fostered the belief among us that the bottom line should control. Clients have, in effect, reshaped us into their image. Just as loyalty once kept our clients in the fold, so to speak, clients are now guided more by what and how their lawyers charge them and how efficiently we solve their problems, i.e., how we affect their bottom line. Clients like to see what we have done that entitles us to the large fees we bill. The logging of time is an ostensibly objective way to show the things we've done for which we seek compensation. In the attempt to be more business-like and show our clients just what we did to earn our ever-burgeoning fees, we began religiously to record our time. And that translates itself down the line into what older lawyers now demand of themselves and their partners and insist on --- and get --- from their younger colleagues, i.e., more billable hours.6 The goal of more billable hours leads to more competition in a fiercely competitive profession. The use of the itemized billable hour has served not only to justify escalating fees, but has often resulted in increasing the number of hours logged. Too often, I fear, that has become, subconsciously perhaps, a goal in itself, almost equal to the problem to be solved. Most of us who have examined itemized bills of other lawyers in fee hearings know that that is true. And judges know it too and usually react adversely to it. Rarely do courts order payment for all of the hours logged and fees requested in a case. I'm sure no lawyer enjoys keeping timesheets. Some lawyers have found the practice of time-keeping to be time-consuming, frustrating and demeaning, causing them to live out their professional lives in six minute intervals, i.e., the increments many lawyers use in timekeeping. Because no one likes a six minute "byte" showing on his or her time sheet, even a minimal phone call is often logged as two-tenths of an hour, i.e., 12 minutes --- more than 10 but less than 15 minutes. Many lawyers disdain the practice of logging one phone call altogether. Some lawyers keep a small notepad at hand and carefully jot down the actual time they begin and stop working for a client, ending up with a perfect record of time worked on a task. But far too many lawyers put five-tenths or half-an-hour of time down for whatever they do, whether a small task or one taking more than a half-hour, because they dislike using their time and interrupting their concentration to keep precise "nit-picking" records of their time. Some lawyers justify inflated time-keeping by pointing out that what is really happening is that clients are merely being charged more per hour, so they aren't really being deceived. On the lighter side, one lawyer I know says he gets even with clients who tell "lawyer jokes" by doubling the time he logs on his time sheet while he has to listen to them!  I remember talking once to probably the then most successful sole practitioner in Tulsa. That was many years ago, in the early fifties, when charging by the hour was not a widely accepted way of practicing law. I asked him if he logged and charged by the hour. Using expletives for emphasis, he stood six foot four in his cowboy boots and snorted contemptuously that he was not a "brick mason." He announced that he charged what his work was worth --- more if he performed a complex problem or did a good job, less for a simple job or one in which he didn't get a good result. I suspect that most of us who bill by the hour also add a premium for good results. But I also suspect that many of us rarely reduce our bill for moderate results. And there are other ways our clients have led us astray from our principles. Often, they have led us into shaping ourselves to fit the image demanded by clients, i.e., the tough Rambo-type lawyer who is brusque and rude to adverse parties, deponents, witnesses and opposing counsel. Lawyers often act not with civility, but as their clients, guided by the wild courtroom antics they see in the movies and on television and read about in newspapers and news magazines, expect that they act and demand that they act.  And our state courts have not done what they might have done to curb the incivility and bad manners of many lawyers in court today. Judge Ito, as well as the trial lawyers involved, created the O.J. Simpson fiasco which has done so much to tarnish our much tarnished public image. Lawyers do and say things in court today that they would never have thought of doing or saying in prior years.  But, is it possible that lawyers today are satisfied with what we have become? Why not go the way of the world? If we dislike the change we have had, wouldn't changing back to what we were put us out of step with the rest of the world? Personally, I think most of us would prefer to retain the many good changes we've had as lawyers but want also to recoup the good elements of professionalism we have lost as lawyers. Assuming that we want to do more than pay lip service to professionalism, are we doing enough to restore professionalism, ethics and civility to today's bar? Some believe that we should start with what they think is the main problem, too many lawyers. Considering the breadth and complexity of the legal problems of today, and the independence we want to retain, I don't think we have too many lawyers. Besides, Martin H. Belsky, Dean and Professor of Law of the University of Tulsa College of Law, recently wrote me that he strongly believes there are not too many lawyers. Dean Belsky writes that: 

Statistics indicate that close to one-third of individuals making between $20,000 and $70,000 a year will never use a lawyer at all. Second, another one-third will only use a lawyer three to four times in their whole life. Thus, we have failed in making legal services available for the middle class. If we could even increase marginally the amount of work that lawyers do for the middle class, we would be benefiting society and, of course, have plenty of work for all. It is no surprise to me that pre-paid legal services, and other insurance plans are growing enormously.

I certainly do not think that law schools should be asked to limit their enrollments or that the bar should increase its entrance requirements to limit the number of lawyers. I think everyone who has the aptitude and wants to study law and be a lawyer should have the same chance we all had. We need most if not all of the increased number of law school graduates. But students who are considering the study and practice of law should be warned that the practice of law is not a bed of roses, that it is not the road to affluence for all, and that the field is, indeed, crowded and becoming more crowded.  And I submit that law schools should be asked to place and should place greater emphasis on courses in ethics and professionalism. Law schools should put more emphasis on values which everyone acknowledges have been eroding in our society. That suggestion would have been laughable 50 years ago. It was a given. But today, we must do more to persuade law students that the law is not merely a bag of tricks, that law school is more than a training ground for technicians who seek to succeed at a trade. As Professor Maryanne Glendon of Harvard has said, we must stop "dumbing down ethics" and do what we can to promote them.  Dean Belsky tells me that TU's law school is trying its best to inculcate the values of professionalism from the time of a student's first day in law school through speeches, actual classes, required ethics courses and inclusion of ethics and professionalism in all courses. Dean Belsky is a member of the OBA's Task Force whose report was recently approved by our Supreme Court. The report provides for a mandatory two- or three-day course for all new lawyers who have been admitted to the Bar by examination, which among other things would emphasize experience on how to deal with professionalism and with ethical issues as they arise. The program will shortly be finalized and put into effect.  Is there a better way of billing? "Value billing" is frequently discussed as an alternative to billing by the hour. But since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed "minimum" fee schedules, there has been no objective standard of any kind for valuing services. No one ever thought minimum fees were the whole answer anyway. I fear that we are stuck with a system with many temptations and with only our conscience to guide us in billing.  One last word in defense of billing by the hour. I feel that the system has the virtue of promoting structure and discipline in a lawyer's day. It also has the virtue of providing us with a written record of just what we have done for the client. The fault lies in the slavish application of the hourly rate to the hours logged without considering the actual value of the service rendered. If we accurately log our time and services, and consider the value of the services rendered, we have a combination of the best of both systems. We must "temper the wind to the shorn lamb," as well as reward ourselves for superior results achieved. That, admittedly, is still a highly subjective determination. But it is better than using a method not unlike that used by the mythical villain, Procrustes, i.e., amputating the legs or (more likely) stretching the body of everyone who falls into our clutches to fit the same hourly rate bed.  And we must make it clear to clients by our actions that lawyers have higher principles "than those of the market place" and that we will not stoop to gutter tactics to fit the image many clients have of lawyers. I know that sounds holier-than-thou and easier than it is to do. But, if all lawyers adopt a common front in that regard, we can do it.  As far as the courts are concerned, I submit that they should be made aware that what they do in demanding proper conduct in court will have a great deal to do with advancing civility in our own ranks. Our state courts can be guided by the Federal courts, which demand and get the respect to which the judiciary is entitled. In my opinion, courts can do much to restore respect for the courts and civility among lawyers.  And remember, I entitled this paper "the decline of professionalism" and not the fall or death of professionalism. There are many, many things of which the profession can be justly proud. There are some signs of the rebirth of professionalism. And remember, I am talking about "some" lawyers, not "all" lawyers taking the wrong path.  In some regards, lawyers are more professional in a broader sense today than they were when I first started to practice. For one thing, today's lawyers exhibit their professionalism in ways that I don't recall lawyers doing in earlier years. And that is in their pro bono services as lawyers. Of course, lawyers have performed pro bono services from time immemorial. Lawyers have always worked pro bono in many ways, from helping the indigent to providing legal services free or at cost to churches, museums and other arts organizations, and to charitable organizations.  But I don't recall seeing the organized contribution of time and services exhibited by lawyers in recent years in representing juvenile delinquents in Juvenile Court. Tulsa County District Judge Tom Crewson has long been high in his praise of the pro bono efforts of Tulsa County's lawyers in Tulsa County Juvenile Court. I don't think the answer lies in the fact that there were not as many juvenile delinquents, or that there was no full-fledged Juvenile Court. I think it lies in the broader view many lawyers have now of what it means to be a lawyer. For another thing, lawyers' organization, funding and support for indigents displayed by Legal Services of Eastern Oklahoma, Inc., Legal Services of Western Oklahoma, Inc., Oklahoma Indian Legal Services, Inc. and lawyers' successful annual drives for Funds for Legal Aid are additional examples of how lawyers have adopted professionalism in its very highest sense.  And we should all be heartened by what we see the organized national and state bar associations and various other lawyers' organizations are doing to promote professionalism.  So far as the American Bar Association is concerned, I am told that in every speech he has given since taking office, President Shestack has indeed stressed those very values on which he announced in 1997 that the ABA would focus. And Jack Brown, the Tulsa County Bar's ABA delegate, reports that under President Shestack's tutelage and in keeping with his promise, the ABA is distributing Promoting Professionalism, a volume which has undergone many drafts.8 It is a volume which describes what the ABA is doing to advance professional values. It contains input from just about all of the ABA's entities and provides perspectives on the ABA's activities --- something which has never been done before.  The Oklahoma Bar's Continuing Legal Education requirement of one hour of ethics training is also a step in the right direction. But it is perhaps all too short a step. And the ethics hour is too often treated like a step-child, as an add-on to other CLE programs without any real concentration on the subject of ethics itself. CLE should try to restore the goal of civility among lawyers, as well as train in ethics alone.  On the brighter side, Dan Murdock, the OBA's esteemed General Counsel, has been traveling around the State for the last several years giving his excellent Professionalism Program, which qualifies for the one hour required ethics training.  The American Inns of Courts whose first and two subsequent chapters in Tulsa County were organized and fostered by Judge Brett, are a great step in the right direction. The Inns place emphasis on professionalism and ethics and civility, along with legal excellence, as their goals. Although more than 20,000 lawyers and judges have met to date in the American Inns of Court one or more times, unfortunately, there are still all too few Inns and their membership too limited. I would hope that the number of Inns could be expanded or that like organizations be sponsored by the organized bar so that more of us could have the benefit of membership and participation and friendship with each other.  One of the worst aspects of the growth in size of local bar associations is that we have fewer opportunities proportionately to get to know each other. One is less likely to be rude to a fellow lawyer whom he has met and gotten to know. Membership in an American Inn fosters the collegiality which was once promoted by the once-upon-a-time Saturday morning motion dockets in District and Common Pleas Courts, where lawyers got to see each other in action, and visit with and know each other on a relatively informal basis. In those days, many motions were disposed of by those lawyers at those hearings by talking with each other informally, without the need for the scheduled hearing. The press of business, crowded court dockets, and the elimination of Saturday work for courts and lawyers have eliminated that opportunity for us to get to know and work with each other at motion dockets. Lawyers now meet and get to know each other for the first time when a suit is filed or when they are called to work on a transaction when it is initiated by their clients. I submit we would be less likely to file suit or to file a motion to compel, and less likely to incur a motion for sanctions if we knew each other and could talk informally with each other before and after filing a suit. But nowhere is the survival of professionalism best shown than at the county bar association level. I speak from my experience watching the Tulsa County Bar Association during 50 years. It has not only grown and prospered through the years, but it has broadened its aims and purposes. And it has grown and prospered not only because we have more lawyers, but because of the commitment, organizational skills and loyalty of its members, and most of all, of its officers, directors and leaders. I hope other county bar associations have prospered as Tulsa's has. The area in which I am most familiar is the Tulsa County Bar's Professional Responsibility Committee. I have been on the committee from time to time while I have practiced law, during which it has evolved from the "grievance" committee with three or four members to the committee of recent years with its present name, with membership of up to 50 lawyers, a large number of whom attend the monthly meetings. Under the very able leadership of the chairmen9 of recent years in which I have become more involved with the committee, complaints are processed quickly and efficiently. A cynic might observe that we have a large professional responsibility committee because there are so many lawyers who stub their toes. On the contrary, I think it is because although there are indeed many more lawyers today, the lawyers' public image becomes more tarnished daily and lawyers are aware of their shortcomings and eager to meet and rectify the publics complaints and restore the lawyers' image. Too often, complaints from clients are based on lack of communication of a lawyer with his client, a lawyer's rudeness to his client, or the rudeness of a lawyer's staff to the client. These are com plaints that would not occur if we all practiced civility and good manners in dealing with our clients, as well as with our fellow lawyers and with the courts, and instructed and required our staff to do so. The hurdles do seem daunting indeed. Perhaps we can accomplish most in regaining the honor and the prestige to which our profession is entitled by our own attitude toward our profession. U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler of Miami, Florida, gave a great talk in October, 1996, to the General Session of the American College of Trial Lawyers' Annual Meeting in San Diego entitled "The Lawyers Honor --- A Casualty of Our Times?" Judge Hoeveler gave this quote from a tattered but cherished book of his called American Advocacy, published in 1904:

Nothing should be higher in the estimation of the advocate next after those sacred relations of home and country than his profession. She should be to him 'the fairest of 10,000' among the institutions of the earth. He must stand for her in all places and resent any attack on her honor as if the same attack were to be made against his own fair name and reputation. He should enthrone her in the secret places of his heart. And to her, he should offer her the incense of constant devotion . . . That this is not mere sentiment is evidenced by the successful careers of the world's greatest lawyers who were, invariably, the most enthusiastic devotees of their profession's honor and esprit de corps.

The ethics of a profession require that a member of the bar shall be first an honest man. He must live in rectitude and cherish his personal honor, not forgetting that personal honor is the distinguishing badge of the legal profession.

The road we take does make a difference. 1. The quotations and percentages immediately following are reprinted with permission from the May 26, 1997 issue of The National Law Journal. Copyright 1998, The New York Law Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 
2. Friends of mine in all three professions are concerned that their respective professions have declined through the years. Physician friends with whom I have discussed the subject of professionalism say that managed care plans and medical insurance have been largely responsible for the decline in the principles of professionalism in their ranks. The awarding of bonuses to doctors who are reluctant to order expensive tests or procedures for their patients which good practice dictates, points to "the lofty eloquence of gold." 
3. "You are what you drive" is frequently heard today. It certainly seems to be widely believed.
4. Based on figures provided by the Oklahoma Bar Association, Tulsa County Library, and University of Tulsa College of Law library. 
5. These are approximate figures, but the only ones available to me at this time. They were kindly provided by Prof. Sidney Huttner, Curator of the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, from Agenda for Civil Justice Reform in America, A Report from the Presidents Council on Competitiveness. August, 1991. 
6. See comments by Mr. John Frank in his award acceptance speech made in Phoenix, supra. 
7. A recent fiscal year earnings report of a nationwide pre-paid legal services plan, stated that its earnings have doubled since its last fiscal year. 
8. Copies of the ABA's Promoting Professionalism booklet may be obtained by calling the ABA Service Office at 1-800-285-2221. 
9. This article is one of a series of several articles on professionalism, suggested by W. Thomas Coffman, President of the Tulsa County Bar Association, and implemented by Phil Frazier, TCBA Director at Large and one of the recent past Chairmen of the TCBA's Professional Responsibility Committee. 

JOHN S. ATHENS, a native Tulsan, received his B.A. from Yale University graduating with honors, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his J.D. from its School of Law. He was admitted to the OBA in 1948, served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Oklahoma for three years before joining Conner & Winters, the firm with which he has been since November 1952, except for a year when he was appointed Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma by the late U.S. Judge Royce S. Savage. He and the late John Wallace of Miami founded the OBA Clients Security fund in 1985 and he is also a charter member of the OBA Litigation Section. He has served as a director, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer of the TCBA and is a member of the ABA. In 1994, he received the W. Lee Johnson Chapter of the American Inns of Court "John S. Athens Leadership Award" and was named the TCBA Outstanding Senior Lawyer for 1994-95. Mr. Athens is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a founding Master of the W. Lee Johnson Chapter of the American Inns of Court.